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The American Prospect - articles by authorenWashington Metro Sinks into the Swamp in NHL Playoff Miscuehttp://prospect.org/article/washington-metro-sinks-swamp-nhl-playoff-miscue
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<p>A Washington Metro station</p>
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<p><span class="dropcap">H</span>ow desperate is the state of public transit this Infrastructure Week? So desperate that the Washington Metro Area Transportation Authority turned to a foreign government to secure the $100,000 it needed to keep Metrorail open late, so that hockey fans could get home from National Hockey League Eastern Conference Playoff Game 4 on Thursday at a downtown arena.</p>
<p>Ponder that for a second: District of Columbia transit officials decided to rely on the <a href="https://wapo.st/2Lb2Miz">government of Qatar’s</a> munificent gesture. And recall that a Qatari government-affiliated company <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/17/nyregion/kushner-deal-qatar-666-5th.html">may bail</a> President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and his family out from under an onerous Manhattan office building mortgage; that Trump attorney Michael Cohen tried to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trumps-personal-attorney-solicited-1-million-from-government-of-qatar/2018/05/16/e787e716-592c-11e8-858f-12becb4d6067_story.html?utm_term=.4129b2b3876e">woo</a> Qatar as a client for his “consulting” services; and that Qatar has been embroiled in a long-running political <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2017/06/06/middleeast/qatar-middle-east-diplomatic-freeze/index.html">crisis</a> that resulted in a <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/dominicdudley/2018/05/17/as-qatar-prepares-to-mark-a-year-under-the-saudi-embargo-it-looks-like-the-winner-in-the-dispute/#2757eabb7720">trade embargo</a> against the country by Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.</p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">The Qatari-Metro decision produced intense public criticism, since Metro cannot accept funds from foreign governments.</span> Accordingly, Metro officials initially nixed the plan. But someone came up with another idea: have the Qataris steer the monies, not to Metro directly, but to an intermediary, so an otherwise eyebrow-raising transaction would appear less direct. The government of Qatar conveyed the money to the Downtown DC Business Improvement District, a local economic development organization, which then passed along the funds to Metro.</p>
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p dir="ltr" lang="en" xml:lang="en">Metro late-night service back on for Caps game after Qatar agrees to provide funding through business group <a href="https://t.co/fOa6HdBnYN">https://t.co/fOa6HdBnYN</a></p>
<p>— Dr. Gridlock (@drgridlock) <a href="https://twitter.com/drgridlock/status/997174044368699395?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 17, 2018</a></p></blockquote>
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<p>D.C. Councilmember Jack Evans helped broker the deal. It also happens that he is chairman of the WMATA board of directors. Evans maintained that the WMATA transaction was with the local business district association, not a foreign government.</p>
<p>Few people were satisfied with that explanation. As one <em>Washington Post</em> commenter noted, “If Metro can't accept payments from foreign governments, and that is why the Qatar cash went through DCBID, this deal seems like money-laundering.”</p>
<p>Keeping Metro running later than usual so some fraction of the crowd could get home was a commendable impulse. But there are enough area firms and individuals, including Washington Capitals owner Ted Leonsis or any of a number of other Washington one-percenters, who have the funds to make a civic gesture worthy of the nation’s capital.</p>
<p>Exelon, the corporate parent of Pepco, the area electric utility, paid $100,000 keep the Metro open for Game 3 of the playoffs. “I know that there are some other corporate sponsors that are interested in helping the Caps as well as helping Metro,” Exelon’s corporate affairs vice president Maggie Fitzpatrick <a href="https://wtop.com/tracking-metro-24-7/2018/05/good-news-for-caps-fans-metro-extends-late-night-service-for-game-3/">told</a> WTOP Radio. “We certainly will entertain it if we are asked [to pay for Game 4 rail service], but we were asked for this game and are delighted to do it.”</p>
<p>But since other corporate sponsors did not materialize and Exelon did not re-up, the government of Qatar got on board. Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser, up for re-election in November, actually trumpeted the arrangement, noting that Qatar and the District of Columbia had also partnered on an upscale downtown-shopping complex.</p>
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p dir="ltr" lang="en" xml:lang="en">How pathetic that the nation's capital has to rely on a foreign country for basic Metro service. It's not just <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Caps?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Caps</a> fans who demand later service on game days, it's thousands of workers who need it daily.</p>
<p>— Building DC (@BuildingDC) <a href="https://twitter.com/BuildingDC/status/997281983083548672?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 18, 2018</a></p></blockquote>
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<p>But a private, luxury shopping complex and a public transportation system are two different propositions. Why would any local jurisdiction or transit system accept foreign government funding? Could it be because <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/robbing-highways-for-metro-funding-is-a-bad-idea/2018/04/20/38d4fde0-3914-11e8-9c0a-85d477d9a226_story.html?utm_term=.43cca3ec0513">the system</a> is chronically underfunded and in dire financial straits? So when a wealthy country wanted to kick in what for them is chump change, it is no surprise that Washington officials liked what they heard. As to the ethics—well, in Trump’s America, some public officials have become inured to arrangements that in drag them into the muck of the swamp.</p>
<p>For years, Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia have refused to adequately fund the regional transit system (only recently did the three jurisdictions finally <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/metro-gets-3rd-and-final-yes-as-maryland-commits-to-its-full-share-of-dedicated-funding/2018/03/22/ecd63946-2dfa-11e8-8ad6-fbc50284fce8_story.html?utm_term=.38352350822e">agree</a> for the first time in Metro’s history to provide a dedicated revenue stream for the system; the chief obstacle to this had long been Virginia Republicans). WMATA does not earn enough revenue to keep trains running on its own dime, and neither the city nor the team owner wanted to step up to enable the system to stay open 60 minutes past the usual 11:30 p.m. weeknight closing time.</p>
<p>Non-playoff-going riders might have been forgiven for thinking that they, too, would benefit from the extra hour of rail transportation after Game 4. But the only station open was the downtown station adjacent to the arena, so only hockey fans and anyone else who happened to be the vicinity got the benefit. (After Game 3, the entire system remained open.)</p>
<p>So ends another Infrastructure Week. <span class="pullquote-right">In many other cities, municipal leaders and transit officials have persuaded their communities to pay small tax increases to boost revenues for transit and other infrastructure improvements.</span> But Washington area officials have not embraced that option yet, and public-private partnerships will only take a transit system so far—as the playoff game fiasco illustrates. But lest we forget, the United States is one of the wealthiest countries in human history. Municipal leaders should not have to tug on the shirttails of corporations or foreign countries to pay for the basics. Yet that’s where the District of Columbia ended up.</p>
<p>As the Capitals move on to their next contest, Washington officials can breathe easier, as the next game is scheduled for a weekend night, and the weekend service hours won’t force them into another strange alliance. But perhaps Washington officials should work on coming up with other alternatives for the remaining Eastern Conference weeknight games, and, should the Capitals advance, the Stanley Cup Playoffs (as well as any baseball post-season appearances by the Washington Nationals.) When American cities start relying on foreign governments to help run American public services, it’s pretty much game over.</p>
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<p><em>This post has been updated.</em></p>
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</div></div></div>Fri, 18 May 2018 20:24:07 +0000230222 at http://prospect.orgGabrielle GurleyJames Comey Talks Trump, Rudy, and Hillaryhttp://prospect.org/blog/tapped/james-comey-talks-trump-rudy-and-hillary
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>As the White House continues to blast his very existence, former FBI director James Comey rides the wave atop <em>The New York Times</em> bestseller list. His book, <em>A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership</em>, is a tell-not-as-much-you’d-really-like-to-know account of his law enforcement career and its abrupt denouement courtesy of the 45th president. </p>
<p>Predictably, Comey did not offer up much of anything new (want more about Roger Stone and Wikileaks? Keep waiting) during his recent conversation with <em>The Washington’s Post</em>’s Carol Leonnig in front of a rapt audience of roughly 200 people at the newspaper’s downtown headquarters. But a former FBI director is hardly going to drop stunning revelations during a public event at one of the country’s top newspapers.</p>
<p>Yet simply observing one of the principal dramatis personae of the Trump Era was worth the price of admission (free). The smooth, controlled, lanky ex-G-man swerved around probing questions and doubled down on his damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t defense of his Hillary Clinton’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/13/james-comey-book-hillary-clinton-email-investigation">email server</a> decision-making.</p>
<p>He did discuss how the bureau wrestled with the rogue president. Asked whether FBI and Justice Department officials could ever have educated Trump on government norms and traditions, Comey responded: Maybe, but likely not. “It’s possible we could have tried to offer more instruction,” said Comey. “But he’s utterly uninterested in you telling him things about how he should do his job.” </p>
<p>As Americans know well by now, what animates Trump is loyalty uber alles. Of his infamous dinner with the allegiance-demanding president, Comey returned again to the issue of educating an unschooled president, emphasizing that Trump is more interested in “a personal, transactional loyalty” than understanding anything about norms of the relationship between of the president, the FBI, and the Justice Department.</p>
<p>Comey’s comments about Rudy Giuliani set the room set the room chuckling as he described how impressed he was as a young prosecutor working for Giuliani, then the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.</p>
<p>“I loved that my boss was on magazine covers, standing on courtroom steps with his hands on his hips,” Comey said. “It fired me up.” But there was a dark side to Giuliani’s confidence, too: He didn’t have much humility, Comey concluded. “It’s really important for a leader to have that balance.”</p>
<p>Comey saved some of his harshest commentary for Clinton’s email “excesses.” He wasn’t aware, Comey noted, that any of her aides had firmly counseled her against installing the ill-fated email server.</p>
<p>“We didn’t investigate her leadership style,” said Comey, “but [her style] at least raises the prospect that she created a culture around herself as a leader that people wouldn’t tell her when she is full of it; it’s really important as leader to do that.”</p>
<p>As for his take on Trump’s complicity in the swampy dealings consuming his presidency and the cavalcade of problematic associations, from Vladimir Putin to Stormy Daniels, Comey was pure prosecutor: “It’s always struck me as strange when someone always continually denies something—it makes me interested,” he said. “His continual denial of something that’s being investigated by some of the best people in the country is strange.”</p>
<p>The most disturbing aspect of this historical moment for the former FBI director is the erosion of country’s norms around lying. Unlike so many news reporters and pundits who skirt the issue, Comey went straight for the jugular: “The president of the United States lies constantly,” he said, and Americans have become “numb to it,” or worse, “imitate it.”</p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 11 May 2018 21:03:54 +0000230171 at http://prospect.orgGabrielle GurleyPutting the Public First in Public-Private Partnershipshttp://prospect.org/article/putting-public-first-public-private-partnerships
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><em>This article appears in the Spring 2018 issue of </em>The American Prospect <em>magazine. <a href="http://www.prospect.org/subscribe">Subscribe here</a>. </em></p>
<p><span class="dropcap">I</span>n a perfect world, a big-city mayor would not have to wrangle over how to finance a tunnel to the port. But Manny Diaz did not live in a perfect world: He lived in Miami. Port traffic clogging downtown was a decades-old problem. To realize his vision of a vibrant region showcased by a vital city center, Mayor Diaz had to get rumbling, port-bound 18-wheelers off downtown streets.</p>
<p>In 2007, with a plan and money on the table, the Florida Department of Transportation turned up the heat on the term-limited mayor to deliver the tunnel. So Diaz devised a strategy to gin up city and surrounding county support: He tossed a baseball stadium, museums, more funds for a performing arts center—and the tunnel—into one civic wish-list basket and made a successful appeal to regional pride for funding them all. Meanwhile, two multinational firms, Meridiam, a public infrastructure investor, and Bouygues Travaux Publics, a tunneling and engineering firm, arrived on the scene with the dollars to move the complex initiative forward after the Great Recession unspooled the original consortium. “It was perfect timing,” says Diaz.</p>
<p>More than a decade later, the Port of Miami Tunnel is the marquee example of a public-private transportation infrastructure partnership. The concessionaire’s financing sources totaled about $900 million. It gets back a revenue stream based on state and federal funding sources, so there are no tolls. The city now has several new amenities, as well as two tunnels with two lanes each that, shortly after opening, decreased the weekly average volume of all port-bound traffic in downtown Miami by 35 percent and reduced weekly commercial truck traffic by nearly 80 percent.</p>
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<p>When the public sector fails to transfer enough risk to private entities or fails in its own oversight obligations, a state can end up with a fiasco like the Big Dig. Here, activists in Boston protest fare hikes resulting from the project's cost overruns. </p>
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<p>But the tunnel’s success is deceptive, since the unique factors that converged in South Florida cannot be replicated everywhere. For every Port of Miami Tunnel, scores of ill-conceived projects dot the American landscape. The United States lags behind not only in basic maintenance of existing assets at the end of their life cycles but in building the next generation of roads, bridges, rail, tunnels, and aviation projects. With public funds scarce in a climate of tax-cutting and budgetary austerity, the risk is that the contactor/partner pays the up-front costs but sticks future generations of taxpayers and rate-payers with exorbitant charges.</p>
<p>That outcome can be the fruit of cynicism, corruption, naïveté, or fiscal desperation. But states and municipalities can learn to appreciate the differences between partnerships that put the public first and the rip-offs that erode public confidence in government and drain public coffers. A key is the competence of public officials to supervise private ones and negotiate smart contracts. That’s another basic public resource at risk in an age of fiscal scarcity.</p>
<p>In a sense, nearly all transportation projects are public-private partnerships. Public entities own most roads, tunnels, bridges, and subway systems, but private contractors invariably build them. The new wrinkle is the option of having contractors provide some or all of the up-front financing, often in exchange for either a long-term lease or a share of revenues.</p>
<p>The Trump administration’s version of an infrastructure initiative relies heavily on private financing, which may or may not materialize. Trump proposes to have the federal government contribute $200 billion, with the rest of the illusory $1.5 trillion coming from cash-strapped state and local governments and the private sector. This model is disingenuous, partly because not all public needs are profitable; partly because it also hides other cuts to the Highway Trust Fund, Federal Aviation Administration, Amtrak, transit programs, and other areas; and partly because state and local governments are strapped for funds to contribute their proposed share. But the Trump framework is only an exaggeration of recent trends.</p>
<p>At best, new fiscal pressures can lead public officials to get creative, seeking private partners who may bring superior engineering, financing, and legal expertise, and better attention to maintenance and operations. But private-sector involvement does not automatically mean a better outcome. Citizens and public officials often forget that the private sector’s prime motive is profit, not philanthropy. If a firm cannot clear a good return on an investment, either the deal will not materialize or the terms will be onerous to the public. <span class="pullquote">Public debates can be marred by false expectations, and confusion or obfuscation of what distinguishes a good partnership from a rip-off.</span></p>
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<p><strong>A KEY QUESTION IS THE</strong> degree of risk assumed by the public sector or the private entity because of the unknown vagaries of construction. What would the unearthing of significant archeological artifacts do to a construction timetable? Who pays the cost if an underwater tunnel hits unforeseen obstacles? What happens if there is unexpected community opposition and litigation? These factors and dozens more pose risks that must be assessed and calculated in the early planning stages on both sides.</p>
<p>“A strong contract lays out the performance metrics: who is accepting what kind of risk and what happens each step of the way with the meeting of those metrics or the failure to meet those metrics,” says Jim Aloisi, who was Massachusetts transportation secretary under former Democratic Governor Deval Patrick.</p>
<p>Massachusetts is infamous for the cost overruns associated with the Big Dig, which included a new tunnel linking the Massachusetts Turnpike to Logan International Airport and put the major north-south highway bisecting Boston underground. The project came in more than $20 billion over budget counting interest on the extra debt. Public planners erred in contracting out the project design, construction, andmanagement. State lawmakers later intervened <em>and</em> turned management over to a public agency.</p>
<p>If it went massively over budget, it was no skin off the supervising contractors’ noses. Instead of performing its own inspections along the way and holding the multiple vendors accountable, government ended up paying for the overruns after the fact.</p>
<p>A public-private partnership is a hybrid that exists along a continuum of risks. In traditional procurement, the public sector assumes the greater risk, turning over the design and construction to the private sector or consortium while the public agency secures financing, operates, maintains, and owns the completed project. This model is known as design-build.</p>
<p>Further along the risk continuum are long-term leases, known as DBFOM arrangements (for design, build, finance, operate, and maintain). Typically, the private sector takes on all the risks associated with unforeseen engineering issues, cost overruns, legal entanglements, or other issues. Those details, of course, depend on whether government negotiates a good contract. The private partner provides the bulk of the up-front dollars, in effect a loan to the public sector. Taxpayers or toll-payers eventually pay the cost one way or another.</p>
<p>“The whole business has matured and has changed the way [the] private sector and the public sector thinks about it,” says Aloisi. “People like me who are progressive … have looked at the direction this has moved in and are much more sanguine about it. I have seen too many examples of the public sector failing. I don’t think it’s appropriate to adhere to strict ideology at this point. I’m more ‘show me the facts’: Where are the risks, incentives, and what are you paying labor?”</p>
<p>Some municipalities have moved to get out of the business of owning and operating assets like parking garages or local roads and are selling these public assets outright to private companies—these are usual smaller deals. Under leasing deals, arrangements can run anywhere from roughly 30 to 50 years with the public entity maintaining ownership, but ceding functions like operation and maintenance to the private partner. Many public officials take a dim view of ceding public assets like roadways that are integral to a transportation network for longer periods, since that means giving up public stewardship, which is needed to respond to changing traffic and housing patterns.</p>
<p>Despite Trump administration hyperbole about encouraging private-sector participation in the country’s infrastructure enterprise, the majority of transportation infrastructure projects do not interest the private sector, since they do not have an associated revenue stream, such as tolls, or offer any other attractive features to tempt investors, particularly in rural areas.</p>
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<p>Chicago’s 75-year lease for its 36,000 parking meters with a limited liability company headed by Morgan Stanley and others was one of the worst, if not the worst, P3 deal in U.S. history.</p>
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<p>To attract private-sector interest in rural projects, Pennsylvania, for example, bundled some 560 rural bridge-replacement projects into a nearly $1 billion, 25-year maintenance package, contracting with a private consortium to provide the funds and do the work. In its analysis of the project, the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington research organization, noted that the consortium could increase its profit margins by skimping on longer-term quality. Which means that the Keystone State must have a strong inspection regime in place to monitor the spans.</p>
<p>When the public sector fails to transfer enough risk to private entities or fails in its own oversight obligations, a state can end up with a fiasco like the Big Dig. A key factor in a good public-private partnership, or P3, is whether the public entity has the expertise and integrity to keep the private partner honest.</p>
<p>Large P3s comprise only a fraction of the highway projects built in the United States. In the 23-year period between 1989 and 2012, 79 design-build transportation projects (the more public variant) budgeted at $50 million or higher were launched in the United States, according to the “Public Works Financing” newsletter. Of the more complex DBFOMprojects, only 13 projects of $50 million or more were built during that period. So P3s are no panacea, but just one tool among many.</p>
<p>A more fundamental problem is dwindling public capacity. For the past several decades, conservatives have so undermined citizens’ faith in the public sector and stripped it of resources that pursuing new taxes, tolls, or fees to build new bridges, tunnels, and subways can be a political nonstarter. But these attitudes could change, if voters realize that failure to countenance tax increases means many public agencies will no longer have the resources to hire well-trained planners and engineers to keep up with maintenance demands, or to build new roads and bridges, or to keep contractors from passing hidden costs to the public.</p>
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<p><strong>COMPLETED IN 2014,</strong> the $1 billion Port of Miami Tunnel involved a 35-year concession agreement. “When you have high-profile, expensive projects, you don’t have that kind of cash lying around,” says Diaz, now a senior partner at Lydecker Diaz, a Miami law firm. “But you do have the ability to raise that cash over time; so it’s almost like a long-term loan that gives you access to capital that allows you to do those major projects.”</p>
<p>Florida benefited from exceptionally strong technical, commercial, legal, and financial advisers who were well-matched to their private-sector counterparts. <span class="pullquote">Today, most states know that they must have first-caliber in-house experts and consultants if they intend to partner with a private company on a major project.</span> “But back then, a lot of times when people said ‘public-private partnership,’ a governor or a mayor would hire their brother-in-law’s accounting firm and say, ‘Figure out what this means for us,’” says Joe Aiello, a partner at Meridiam who helped steer the project. “But Florida and Miami-Dade [County] went out and got the best.”</p>
<p>Aiello concedes that it may “sound crazy” that an investor would prefer going up against seasoned public-sector officials who can pull together a solid procurement process. But he sees long-term benefits for the private partner. “We want these deals to be rock solid and well thought-out because we are going to be there for 35 to 40 years,” he says.</p>
<p>A well-executed contract gives a public agency leverage when things go wrong. As long as the tunnel adheres to performance standards specified in the contract, the consortium continues to receive “availability” payments from the state. “The investor-developer in the private sector [is] in the world of no-excuses … so that the government is getting [the] best possible price,” Aiello says. “This is what astounded everybody … especially public officials who didn’t realize that you could transfer so much risk, especially long-term, to the private sector at a fixed cost.”</p>
<p>How labor fares should be key, especially in a right-to-work state like Florida. Some P3 deals try to save money by avoiding union contracts that would be required on explicitly public projects, as mandated by federal or state law. Unions, including the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the Laborers’ International Union of North America, worked on the tunnel. But a 2013 Center for American Progress report found that the union representing workers who operate heavy equipment did not participate in creating the project’s hiring program. One union official also claimed that Bouygues “wouldn’t talk to us.”</p>
<p>Union representation in these arrangements hinges on the state labor climate. When the Maryland Port Administration decided to modernize the container berth at the Port of Baltimore’s Seagirt Marine Terminal to accommodate Super Post Panamax cargo ships, using a $1.3 billion, 50-year P3 contract with Ports America to operate the facility, the company preserved all union jobs.</p>
<p>State enabling legislation, experienced public agency procurement teams, and brokering of regional buy-in were also features of the Denver area’s $2 billion Eagle P3 Project. Its Regional Transportation District brought in a private consortium to build commuter rail lines connecting the city’s Union Station to outlying areas as well as a maintenance facility. The 34-year deal (which also survived the Great Recession) relied on $1 billion in federal funding, a regional sales tax, and $450 million in capital from Denver Transit Partners, the private consortium. For that, the private entity gets payments linked to meeting performance, operation, and maintenance metrics and is responsible for keeping the commuter rail cars in good repair.</p>
<p><span class="pullquote">Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper recalls that when he was mayor of Denver during the initial phases of the Eagle P3 project, he had to quell the “Hatfields and McCoys”–style feuding between Denver and its suburbs</span> (much like Diaz did in Miami and its environs) to smooth the way for expanding the regional transit system and to persuade voters to back the network with a 0.4 percent sales tax increase in 2004. The regional transportation agency laid out the performance standards it expected the concessionaire to adhere to in cost-effectiveness, performance, safety, rider experience, and reliability and prioritized those standards over design and other aspects of the project.</p>
<p>“The key there is if you run into trouble [or] if your concessionaire creates a problem, [you know] who pays the freight,” says Hickenlooper. Apportionment of risk to the concessionaire has already protected area taxpayers. When Denver Transit Partners determined that one of the bridges would not hold up to specified performance standards, the group demolished and rebuilt the span. The public Regional Transportation District was not liable for additional monies.</p>
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<p><strong>OF THE PITFALLS THAT DOOM</strong> partnerships with private vendors, the most damning is insufficient transparency. Ironically, when private contractors cheat the public, it is government rather than the privatization process that gets the blame—fueling a conservative narrative that the government is an unreliable guardian of public assets while corporations can parachute in better solutions. Some politicians feed this story when their desire for a quick cash infusion causes public officials to accept arrangements with little to no public oversight, unleashing a cascade of missteps that negate short-term fiscal benefits and reverberate years later.</p>
<p>Chicago’s 75-year lease for its 36,000 parking meters with a limited liability company headed by Morgan Stanley and others (among them a German financial firm and the government of Abu Dhabi) was one of the worst, if not the worst, P3 deal in U.S. history. The slipshod agreement dented residents’ already low confidence in the city’s leaders and undermined the city’s fiscal health for decades.</p>
<p>In 2008, Mayor Richard M. Daley rammed the $1.1 billion plan through a quiescent city council in three days, refusing to divulge the bidders or detailed financial analyses. No municipal transportation officials or lawmakers ever studied the agreement. A deeper analysis would have shown that the deal called for additional payments to the concessionaire if parking meters came out of service for street fairs, repaving projects, or traffic circulation improvements. Daley used lump-sum payments to plug budget deficits. Residents went ballistic as rates exploded. The city now has the highest on-street parking fees in the country.</p>
<p>The Chicago inspector general found that the meters were worth at least twice as much as the lump-sum payment the city received for transferring them to the private consortium. The city is stuck with the deal until 2083.</p>
<p>The current mayor, Rahm Emanuel, sided with the consortium in a 2014 lawsuit challenging the deal. The group’s lawyers had contributed to his re-election campaign. In 2018, along with turning over all of the revenue from the parking meters to the concessionaire, the city owes an additional $20 million, a nearly 20 percent increase over the previous year, to compensate for lost revenues from meters taken out of service.</p>
<p>The deal continues to undermine Chicago’s ability to plan for future transit improvements. Instead of being able to consider bus, rapid transit, pedestrian safety improvements, or other projects on their merits, planners must consider how many parking meters must be taken out of service (with the attendant uptick in additional payments to the vendor), which may doom some of those projects.</p>
<p>Public accountability has also gone missing in St. Louis, where city officials continue to debate a proposal to lease the city-owned and -operated Lambert International Airport, a plan championed by former mayor Francis Slay and his successor Lyda Krewson. The airport director learned about the plan after the application had been filed with the Federal Aviation Administration’s Airport Privatization Pilot Program in 2017. The city’s board of aldermen were not consulted.</p>
<p>Missouri billionaire and Republican political donor Rex Sinquefield steered the escapade. He funded the FAA application and will be reimbursed if an agreement is finalized, while his political action committee, Grow Missouri, advises the city on the agency’s process and pays the consultants. Meanwhile, the airport remains a valuable transportation asset, having retired and refinanced debt.</p>
<p>A recent In the Public Interest report, which conducts research on privatization and investigated the St. Louis plan, found: “The [request for proposals] for the advisory contract is structured in a way that will eliminate the city’s opportunity to fully evaluate options for the development of the airport. Since the contractor is only compensated if the airport is privatized, it will not be in their interest to provide full, independent and objective analysis that would benefit and serve the interests of the city. This contract should not be finalized under these conditions.”</p>
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<p>The billion-dollar Port of Miami Tunnel is a successful public-private infrastructure partnership completed in 2014. Here, construction workers watch the official opening of the tunnel in 2014. </p>
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<p>“The advocates for privatizing the St. Louis airport are failing to heed important lessons from Chicago’s parking meter disaster,” says ITPI Executive Director Donald Cohen. “They aren’t doing a rigorous fiscal and financial analysis to compare public versus private options that cost Chicago $1 billion. And they aren’t thinking long-term about what decisions city leaders won’t be able to make because [those decisions could] hurt the private operator’s bottom line.”</p>
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<p><strong>WHEN A PRIVATE-SECTOR</strong> actor fails to live up to the role of turnaround artist, it falls to public entities to pick up the pieces. To acquire Stewart International Airport in Newburgh, New York, in 2000, the National Express Group (NEG), a British rail, bus, and coach transit company that expanded into airport operations in Great Britain, paid $35 million to the New York State Department of Transportation for a 99-year lease to operate the facility under the FAA’s 1997 Airport Privatization Pilot Program.</p>
<p>The hope was that the new operator could improve the facility and attract more passengers to the lightly used airport north of New York City. Metro New York has long sought a fourth airport. The premise unraveled as the fallout from September 11, 2001, rippled through the aviation industry. NEG also ran into legal opposition from local environmentalists opposed to the plan for a new access road to the airport.</p>
<p>NEG soon announced other priorities, and tried to relinquish the lease. But there were no offers. After seven years, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey acquired Stewart for nearly $80 million. A 20-year plan to upgrade the airport included a name change, renovations, and better transit connections.</p>
<p>Of the 12 airports that have pursued privatization through the FAAprogram since 1997, only one, the Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico, remains in the hands of a private operator. Currently, three airports (including Lambert) have submitted preliminary privatization applications. The FAA’s complex regulations make most privatization scenarios unappealing, especially since airlines have veto power over such transfers.</p>
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<p><strong>STATES AND LOCALITIES </strong>that pursue public-private partnerships must do their homework. Public officials must determine whether involvement of the private sector is cost-effective, and they must engage highly experienced professionals who can run a transparent procurement process, particularly in the case of projects that a private entity wants to finance, operate, and maintain. Purely political considerations, especially ones predicated on general budgetary pressures rather than on the needs of the transportation sector, should be resisted.</p>
<p>The temptation to look for private-sector rescues is understandable. The United States is trillions of dollars short in funding to build the next generation of megaprojects. The bill is past due for repairs to transportation assets of the past century.</p>
<p>Public-private partnerships can play a role, but no one should exaggerate what they can achieve. “P3s are a very effective tool that helps communities build critical infrastructure, not the solution,” says Governor Hickenlooper. “We as a society are fighting over whether it’s federal, state, or local money. We’ve got to resolve the bickering and say, ‘This is the real infrastructure that we need, we can afford it, so let’s build.’” </p>
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</div></div></div>Thu, 26 Apr 2018 09:00:00 +0000230083 at http://prospect.orgGabrielle GurleySecuring Cities from Cyber Attackshttp://prospect.org/article/securing-cities-cyber-attacks
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<p>New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio holds a press conference on March 29, 2018, to announce the launch of NYC Secure.</p>
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<p><span class="dropcap">A</span>tlanta is a major cybersecurity hotspot. The city is home to the Georgia Institute of Technology, which houses nearly a dozen cybersecurity labs and centers and hundreds of scientists and researchers, and which regularly hosts cybersecurity conferences. Georgia has the country’s <a href="http://www.georgia.org/industries/information-technology/cybersecurity/">third-largest</a> information-security sector with more than 115 firms bringing in nearly $5 billion in annual revenue, according to state data. Construction is underway in Augusta on the Georgia Cyber Innovation and Training Center, a statewide facility to “promote modernization in cybersecurity technology for both the private and public sectors.”</p>
<p>The center won’t have to look far for its first case study after Atlanta failed to take full advantage of the rich technology ecosystem in its own backyard. In mid-March, a ransomware attack compromised nearly half of the city government’s departments. <em>The </em><em>Atlanta Journal-Constitution</em> reported that the city’s municipal court system finally got back up and running this week, thanks to what a city spokesperson called “the implementation of a manual paper-based process.”</p>
<p>The attackers originally demanded the equivalent of $51,000 in <a href="https://www.cnet.com/how-to/what-is-bitcoin/">Bitcoin</a> in exchange for “keys” to regain access to the compromised systems. Some departments like zoning and housing continued to conduct business by relying on staff, but others, like the municipal courts and the city’s watershed management department, suffered more extensive disruption, and the city continues to deal with the fallout.</p>
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p dir="ltr" lang="en" xml:lang="en">City of Atlanta Shuts Down Watershed Operations Website as Ransomware Problems Remain <a href="https://twitter.com/lailakearney?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@lailakearney</a> <a href="https://t.co/4jPDemXJl4">https://t.co/4jPDemXJl4</a> <a href="https://t.co/sWuj39AXek">https://t.co/sWuj39AXek</a></p>
<p>— Metacurity - All Infosec All The Time (@Metacurity) <a href="https://twitter.com/Metacurity/status/982242673581961216?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 6, 2018</a></p></blockquote>
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<p>The identity of the criminals remains murky, but the malware (malicious software) they used, a strain of ransomware known as SamSam, is well-known in the cybersecurity world. According to Wired, while attackers often <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/atlanta-ransomware-samsam-will-strike-again/">gain entry to IT systems</a> via <a href="https://www.webopedia.com/TERM/P/phishing.html">phishing</a>, or scamming users into giving up personal information or other data, SamSam hackers go after bad passwords or other weaknesses. Ransomware is used in nearly 40 percent of all cyberattacks, according to Verizon’s 2018 Data Breach Investigations <a href="https://www.verizonenterprise.com/verizon-insights-lab/dbir/">Report.</a></p>
<p>The week following the attack on Atlanta, Baltimore’s 911 dispatch systems came under a ransomware <a href="http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/bs-md-ci-hack-folo-20180328-story.html">attack</a>. Unlike Atlanta, Baltimore’s problems lasted less than a day and the city temporarily switched to a manual system.</p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">The Atlanta breach underscores the lack of understanding among many municipal leaders that cyber threats demand the same levels of emergency preparedness that natural or man-made disasters do.</span> But unlike the issues that public officials deal with every day—education, poverty, economic development—cybersecurity concerns are not on their radar, even as the attacks multiply around the country. Public officials will have to begin focusing on the issue and deploy what resources they have to arming themselves against cyber attacks so they can act quickly when employees identify system vulnerabilities.</p>
<p>Cities and towns across the country are inviting targets for cyber criminals. In recent years, criminals have gone after <a href="https://www.wired.com/2017/04/dallas-siren-hack-wasnt-novel-just-really-loud/">tornado sirens</a> in Dallas and <a href="https://www.wired.com/2016/11/sfs-transit-hack-couldve-way-worse-cities-must-prepare/">transit-fare collection</a> in San Francisco. In February, attackers took aim at Colorado’s Department of <a href="https://statescoop.com/colorado-has-spent-more-than-1-million-bailing-out-from-ransomware-attack">Transportation</a>. Though none of these targets paid a ransom, cyber criminals interested in making a quick buck have exploited the willingness of some municipalities, hospitals, and universities to pay up. They price their demands to make paying the ransom more attractive than trying to recover data. Leeds, Alabama, a Birmingham suburb, <a href="http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2018/03/leeds_hit_with_ransomware_atta.html">paid</a> $12,000 in Bitcoin to get back control of their computer systems.</p>
<p>“The business of being a bad guy on the internet today is really good,” says Oren Falkowitz, a former National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command senior analyst and founder and CEO of Area 1 Security, a Silicon Valley cloud-based cybersecurity firm. A criminal<em> “</em>can wake up one day and can send a couple of emails and make fifty thousand dollars, a hundred thousand dollars, a couple hundred thousand dollars for basically no work and no cost.” And criminals don’t necessary have to go after a ransom: Municipal networks have immense and valuable stores of personal identification that criminals can sell.</p>
<p>Municipal officials often argue that they can’t afford the experts required to make major security upgrades. A 2016 International City/County Management Association/University of Maryland Baltimore County <a href="https://icma.org/documents/icma-survey-research-cybersecurity-2016-survey">survey</a> of local government cybersecurity practices found that nearly 60 percent of local governments cited an inability to offer competitive salaries for cybersecurity professionals; 53 percent cited insufficient staff and another 52 percent termed a lack of funds as barriers to achieving the “highest possible level of cybersecurity.”</p>
<p>Smaller municipal governments often have the most severe budget constraints. Since they can’t hire the people they need, they make do with the people they have, according to Valorie King, a University of Maryland University College associate professor for cybersecurity management and policy. Scarcity means an IT person gets spread thin, doing desktop support, database management, and “running down the hall because somebody’s iPhone dropped and broke,” says King. “Sometimes we ask too much because the organization can’t afford enough people with specialized training,” she adds.</p>
<p>But some cybersecurity specialists see other problems at work. “There is plenty of money being spent,” says Falkowitz.<strong> “</strong>It’s not being spent efficiently to go after the problem.” He argues that municipal officials not only have a responsibility to keep residents educated and informed about threats, but that municipal officials also must invest in the right strategies, such as protecting systems against phishing attacks, keeping software updated, and making certain that <a href="Oren%20Falkowitz%20the%20former%20chief%20data%20scientst%20for,%20National%20Security%20Agency%20and%20United%20States%20Cyber%20Command.%20and%20founder%20and%20CEO%20of%20Area%201%20Security,%20a%20Silicon%20Valley-based,%20a%20cloud-based%20cybersecurity%20firm">two-factor authentication</a> is standard.</p>
<p>Not surprisingly, New York is an exemplar in cybersecurity preparedness. Last month, Mayor Bill de Blasio <a href="http://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/160-18/mayor-de-blasio-nyc-secure-city-s-first-ever-cybersecurity-initiative-protect-new#/0">announced</a> the deployment of New York Secure, a free citywide smartphone protection app that warns users about intrusions on mobile devices. The mayor also said that the city would provide public Wi-Fi network protection to all users at no charge.</p>
<p>Many of the problems that municipalities face do not require deep knowledge of information systems technology—there are individuals who can bring those skills set to the table—but rather a firm handle on assessing threats and making the required decisions to assure security.</p>
<p>“If management was more aware of the responsibility that they have, their ethical responsibility to ensure that the security and privacy of citizens and the public information that they hold in trust,” King says, “you’re going to look at your organization differently and you are going to hold your managers below you accountable.”</p>
<p>Typically, government agencies focus on quality when it comes to building websites that residents use to apply for government benefits, drivers’ licenses, or other services. After all, municipal officials don’t want the headaches of being bombarded with complaints if a site is difficult to navigate or functions poorly. But <a href="https://www.webopedia.com/TERM/B/back_end_system.html">backend</a> information technology systems don’t necessarily get the same attention. “We don’t often think of quality for internal processes that are not customer-facing,” King says.</p>
<p>In the Baltimore 911 dispatch attack, a <a href="http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/bs-md-ci-hack-folo-20180328-story.html">port left unprotected</a> by a firewall while IT employees addressed another issue allowed attackers to breach the 911 system. King surmises that no one checked or that the check that was performed failed to uncover the issue. She compares these kinds of checks to a completing a house project: Usually a worker will make sure that no nails or hammers or screwdrivers or other tools are left behind. “In IT, we have checklists, procedures, and software that we run to test the firewall to make sure it’s configured properly,” she says. “The basic tools for ensuring quality weren’t effective.”</p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">The Atlanta incident was even more stunning since city officials failed to heed the recommendations of an earlier audit of the city’s IT systems.</span> According to Atlanta’s CBS affiliate, the document <a href="http://www.cbs46.com/story/37821878/internal-audit-shows-city-knew-of-it-vulnerabilities">indicated</a> that “the large number of severe and critical vulnerabilities identified has existed for so long, the organizations responsible have essentially become complacent and no longer take action” while "departments tasked with dealing with the thousands of vulnerabilities ... do not have enough time or tools to properly analyze and treat the systems."</p>
<p>The audit concluded that “This situation represents a significant level of preventable risk exposure to the city” and that there was “no formal program to manage risk.” A cybersecurity specialist<a href="https://www.ajc.com/news/local-govt--politics/emails-show-atlanta-received-multiple-alerts-about-cyber-threats/xbFP3eVt3Eq72lw5UqjIFP/"> told</a> <em>The</em> <em>Atlanta Journal-Constitution</em> that his review of emails between managers and employees who warned about viruses and other incidents suggested negligence on the part of city officials.</p>
<p>“Atlanta failed an audit over a year ago: They were told they had multiple vulnerabilities,” says King. “Anytime you have an audit finding that is not addressed, that’s a management failure; if there was an audit finding against financial controls in a city, it would have been addressed,” she continues. “Those same audit findings for IT vulnerabilities should have the same priorities for getting fixed—that’s an accountability issue at the very top.”</p>
<p>For their part, city officials <a href="http://www.eweek.com/security/atlanta-hit-by-ransomware-attack-impacting-multiple-services">noted</a> that they had taken steps to “mitigate risks,” like moving data to the cloud and assuring that their IT systems have backups. Code for Atlanta, which describes itself as “a bunch of civic-minded technologists, designers, and topic experts,” has started a Change.org petition calling for deep dive into the causes and solutions for Atlanta’s problems.</p>
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p dir="ltr" lang="en" xml:lang="en">In the wake of the City of Atlanta's ransomware attack, <a href="https://twitter.com/codeforatlanta?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@codeforatlanta</a> is calling for a blameless post-mortem, and for the analysis to be shared with the public. <a href="https://t.co/WntQArdMk8">https://t.co/WntQArdMk8</a></p>
<p>— Sunlight Open Cities (@SunlightCities) <a href="https://twitter.com/SunlightCities/status/982261886291865606?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 6, 2018</a></p></blockquote>
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<p>Much like dealing with hurricane or terrorist attacks, cities and towns should design continuity of operations plans that describe how they plan to handle an attack, what backups can be employed and how services will be restored, as well as determining how attackers got in and how to keep them out in the future.</p>
<p>King notes that municipalities should also take a “public hygiene approach” to help keep attackers out. Just as hospitals implement basic steps like handwashing to stem the spread of infections, municipal departments need to assure that employees perform basic security practices, such as avoiding writing down a password and leaving it under a keyboard.</p>
<p>The FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Secret Service have investigated the Atlanta breach, which has cost the city nearly $3 million and forced many residents to return to paper, phone, or in-person visits to conduct their business with the city.</p>
<p>By contrast, Colorado’s SamSam ransomware breach <a href="https://statescoop.com/colorado-has-spent-more-than-1-million-bailing-out-from-ransomware-attack">cost</a> the state more than $1 million and only affected backend systems, so residents did not experience the level of disruptions that Atlanta residents experience. It took about a month to resolve many of the issues, but Colorado officials restored most of its data. State officials were also well-prepared with “comprehensive backup strategies’” according to a Statescoop.com report. Colorado IT officials have been advising their Atlanta counterparts.</p>
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<p><em>This post has been updated.</em></p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 18 Apr 2018 12:59:44 +0000230032 at http://prospect.orgGabrielle GurleyNortheast’s Gateway Tunnel Sideswiped by Republicans’ Omnibus Packagehttp://prospect.org/article/northeast%E2%80%99s-gateway-tunnel-sideswiped-republicans%E2%80%99-omnibus-package
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<p>A train tunnel under the Hudson River as seen from the back of an Amtrak train bound for New York's Penn Station. </p>
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<p><span class="dropcap">P</span>residents like big infrastructure projects. George Washington had a <a href="https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/infrastructure-policy-lessons-from-american-history">keen interest</a> in improving travel on the Potomac River. Dwight Eisenhower believed that a modern interstate highway system was a national security priority. As secretary of commerce, Herbert Hoover spearheaded the construction of the Colorado River dam that bears his name.</p>
<p>Donald Trump perhaps could have shed a smidgen of his pariah status in his native New York (a long-shot to be sure) had he moved forward with the construction of what promises to be an impressive engineering feat, a new rail tunnel under the Hudson River—something even his arch-nemesis Barack Obama couldn’t pull off. </p>
<p>But Trump doesn’t do presidential legacy well. He repeatedly threatened to veto the $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill Congress passed this week, since it did not include his pet legacy project: a multi-billion dollar Mexican border wall. In the end, he signed it. </p>
<p>So the president’s Gateway grudge match against the aura of Obama and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the tunnel’s current champion, continues. This petty drama masks a serious situation. Somehow a rail-safety issue— trains that carry hundreds of thousands of people every day speeding through an ancient, seawater-corroded tunnel— is one the president willfully ignores.</p>
<p>But if Amtrak, the tunnel’s owner, decides to cut the number of trains running through the tunnel (or worse shut down it down completely), hundreds of thousands of regional commuters would have to find some other way to get back and forth to New York. Amtrak also carries more people between Washington and New York and Boston and New York than <a href="https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/public/documents/corporate/nationalfactsheets/National-Fact-Sheet-FY2016-0717.pdf">all of the airlines combined</a>. All of those people would have to come up with a Plan B, too.</p>
<p>“The tunnel has got to happen,” says Jeff Davis, a senior fellow at the <em>Eno</em> Center for Transportation in Washington. “The problem is the tunnel is just too big; it’s not a good fit for any of the existing federal programs.”</p>
<p>The sparring over the Gateway tunnel has provided some deft legislative work in a session that’s largely been devoid of responsible lawmaking. Appropriations Committee Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen, a New Jersey Republican, tried to funnel nearly $1 billion to the tunnel. But only shards of that earmark-esque attempt remain in the legislation after Trump made clear that he’d veto a plan that included big bucks for the tunnel. “It was particularly messed up in this appropriation bill because Schumer as head Democrat is fighting for the House Republican provision that was not in the Senate bill at all,” says Davis.</p>
<p>Amtrak secured nearly $2 billion in the budget deal. The network’s Northeast Corridor received $650 million (up from $250 million) and nearly <a href="https://www.newsday.com/long-island/politics/trump-gateway-russia-putin-mexico-1.17592263">half a billion</a> could be steered to Gateway—but there’s a catch. Although Gateway supporters cheer the deal, the administration argues that the Transportation Department still gets final sign-off on project funding. Most secretaries don’t “micromanage” these decisions, according to Davis. But Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/12/politics/elaine-chao-gateway-comments/index.html">conveys</a> the Trump administration’s disdain for the tunnel at every opportunity so the outlook for Gateway funding remains muddled.</p>
<p>Another project of the Gateway Program, the Portal Bridge, may stand a better chance of overcoming the funding challenges. Preliminary work has begun, but there’s the matter of $1.5 billion needed to begin construction. (According to Davis, a last-minute New Jersey bonding snafu contributed to the bridge’s failure to obtain the passing grade it needed from the Federal Transit Administration to qualify for its Capital Improvement Grant program. But New Jersey officials can reapply.)</p>
<p>The Portal Bridge is a railroad swing bridge over the Hackensack River between Kearny and Secaucus New Jersey, which opens to let boats through and sometimes gets stuck in an upright position, which has already happened twice this year (the latest episode just <a href="https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/transportation/2018/03/16/portal-bridge-malfunction-suspends-service-penn-station-new-york/431129002/">last week</a>), causing cascading train delays.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, train passengers in rural areas will continue to benefit from their only mode of public transportation. <span class="pullquote-right">Stops on long-distance Amtrak routes are the life blood for some rural communities. The problem is that, unlike the Northeast Corridor, those routes are perpetual money-losers.</span> But they continue to survive the attempts to cut them. </p>
<p>Along the Gulf Coast, a proposal to reinstate a Sunset Limited route Orlando to New Orleans received <a href="http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/news/20180312/safety-discussions-could-delay-amtraks-return">$35.5 million</a> in the omnibus bill. (Hurricane Katrina destroyed much of the region’s long-distance rail infrastructure and cities in the region like Jacksonville, Mobile, and Tallahassee have been actively working to get the line running again.)</p>
<p>A similar, perennial battle over scrapping Essential Air Service which provides commercial flights service to small airports is also over—for now, anyway. Trump proposed eliminating the program, but Congress decided to allocate $155 million to the service, a <a href="https://www.schumer.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/senators-schumer-and-gillibrand-announce-155-million-in-federal-funding-for-essential-air-service-program">$5 million increase</a> over fiscal 2017.</p>
<p>There was better news on the TIGER (Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery) grant front, too, with $1.5 billion going into the fiscal 2018 maritime, rail, road, and transit program, the most funding since the program’s debut in the 2009 stimulus package. The grant program <a href="https://www.transportation.gov/tiger">meted</a> out $500 million to 41 programs in 43 states in fiscal 2017, more than with 60 percent of the funds going to rural areas.</p>
<p>Yet, despite his periodic claims about moving to upgrade American infrastructure, Trump has only succeeded in steering his phony rural-urban, red state-blue state civil war into the transportation sector. Trump hews to the narrative that the Hudson River tunnel is some sort of New York-New Jersey vanity project backed by a Schumer cabal while allies like Republican Representative Mark Meadows of North Carolina <a href="http://thehill.com/policy/transportation/railroads/379552-freedom-caucus-chair-trump-campaigned-on-a-wall-not-a-tunnel">complain</a>, “It is troubling when we get a tunnel and we don’t get a wall.” </p>
<p>Yet Trump’s professed concern about rural America is a mirage. The president’s budget included this outmoded nugget about rail travel: “Amtrak’s long-distance trains do not serve a vital transportation purpose and are a vestige of when train service was the only viable transcontinental transportation option.” Rural American only managed to keep its planes and trains because of fierce local public support.</p>
<p>Private companies aren’t generally interested on taking on money losing propositions like rail stops in Montana; most transportation networks require subsidies. Pitting one region against another does not an infrastructure legacy make unless that aim involves expediting the country’s decline. Sadly, Trump’s infrastructure legacy, like most of his presidential portfolio, will be defined by his willful ignorance and his grudges.</p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 23 Mar 2018 21:02:32 +0000229840 at http://prospect.orgGabrielle GurleyCongress Says WOOFF on Gunshttp://prospect.org/article/congress-says-wooff-on-guns
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<p>Louisiana Senator John Kennedy in Washington</p>
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<p><span class="dropcap">O</span>n a day when American students and their supporters marched to demand stricter gun laws and to memorialize 17 people brutally killed at a Florida high school, the news broke that Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana intended to file an animal protection bill. The move came about 48 hours after the death of 10-month old puppy on a Houston to New York flight after United Airlines employees forced the owners to put the animal in overhead bin.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p dir="ltr" lang="en" xml:lang="en">I will be filing a bill tomorrow that will prohibit airlines from putting animals in overhead bins. Violators will face significant fines. Pets are family.</p>
<p>— John Kennedy (@SenJohnKennedy) <a href="https://twitter.com/SenJohnKennedy/status/974034677416722434?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 14, 2018</a></p></blockquote>
<p>His compassion for puppies is commendable. But Kennedy proposes to take zero action on the gun violence that kills schoolchildren.</p>
<p>OK, people love puppies, and animal welfare is an important issue. Few owners want to consign an animal to an airplane cargo hold if they can avoid it: Passengers take small pets on planes so they can be stowed safely under a seat. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the animal welfare advocacy group, <a href="https://www.peta.org/media/news-releases/peta-statement-dog-dies-on-united-airlines-flight-after-being-put-in-overhead-bin/">said</a> that a certain measure of responsibility for the sad episode rested with the people transporting the pet. Most others faulted the crew for exercising poor judgment. The Harris County District Attorney’s Office (Houston is the county seat) has opened <a href="https://nypost.com/2018/03/15/dogs-death-on-united-flight-could-lead-to-criminal-charges/">an investigation</a> into the pet’s death.</p>
<p>Not content to let United, Harris County, or the court of public opinion handle the issue, Kennedy stepped in with the Welfare Of Our Furry Friends Act, or WOOFF:</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p dir="ltr" lang="en" xml:lang="en">Today, I introduced the Welfare of Our Furry Friends Act, also known as WOOFF, w my colleague <a href="https://twitter.com/SenCortezMasto?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@SenCortezMasto</a>. Our bill directs the <a href="https://twitter.com/FAANews?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@FAANews</a> to create regulations to prohibit the storing of a live animal in any overhead compartment and establish civil fines for violations <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/WOOFF?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#WOOFF</a> <a href="https://t.co/U3nZqLNIaH">pic.twitter.com/U3nZqLNIaH</a></p>
<p>— John Kennedy (@SenJohnKennedy) <a href="https://twitter.com/SenJohnKennedy/status/974314896098824197?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 15, 2018</a></p></blockquote>
<p>Kennedy’s motivation for swift action on the incident is unclear. (Although Louisiana Voice blogger Tom Aswell <a href="https://louisianavoice.com/2018/01/10/john-neely-kennedy-takes-marching-orders-from-the-nra-opposes-stronger-background-checks-for-firearm-ownership/">offered</a> this insight about Kennedy in January, “Kennedy, in constant search of a TV camera and microphone, has now gone beyond absurdity in opposing more stringent background checks.”) All 50 states have <a href="http://aldf.org/blog/50-states-now-have-felony-animal-cruelty-provisions/">felony animal cruelty</a> statutes. There are <a href="http://www.houstonhumane.org/cruelty">prohibitions</a> in the Texas penal code pertaining to non-livestock animals, including “transporting or confining an animal in a cruel manner.”</p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">The WOOFF bill is the boldest expression yet of the Republican Party’s singular failure to come to grips with American life as people live it, rather than the conservative fantasyland were men are men, women are subservient, and children are seen but not heard. </span>In one year, Republicans have stripped health care from millions and reduced taxes on 1 percenters and corporations who should pay millions more. They have countenanced more nonsense and ineptitude from the 45th president than the previous 44 put together, while the minions toiling for said chief executive continue to rip the guts out of the federal government.</p>
<p>Republican lawmakers have failed to come up with even a token attempt to declare independence from NRA dollars. Instead, one of their number exerts more legislative energy over a dead pet than dead children and their teachers. It’s not that puppies are cuter than high school students. Louisiana, of course, is a firm gun rights state.</p>
<p>Last October after the Las Vegas concert shootings, the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, Kennedy <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/04/bump-stock-ban-republican-senators-243453">told</a> <em>Politico</em>, “I don’t think we ought to punish 80, 90 million gun owners who have a right to own a weapon under the Constitution because of the act of one idiot,” “Just like I don’t think we ought to condemn all Muslims because of the act of one jihadist.” His <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/nra-political-contributions-congressional-candidates-house-senate-2018-2">career donations</a> from the NRA total $215,788.</p>
<p>While some of Kennedy constituents offered a few attaboys on Facebook over his decision to offer the pet protection legislation, most of the posters were appalled.</p>
<p>“There are more important issues for you to spend time on. May I suggest a few: health care, state budget, common sense gun control, education,” noted one Bossier City, Louisiana, woman. A New Orleans woman said, “As a constituent, I demand an immediate explanation for the more than 33,000 gun deaths in America each year. Or would you care more if it were dogs dying instead of people?”</p>
<p>Twitter lit up, too:</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p dir="ltr" lang="en" xml:lang="en">17 people die in a high school and a month later there's a nationwide protest to get the attention of lawmakers.<br /><br />One dog dies on an airplane and there's a bill in the Senate rectifying it within 48 hours. <a href="https://t.co/YISKBPgtkS">https://t.co/YISKBPgtkS</a></p>
<p>— Dennis Mersereau (@wxdam) <a href="https://twitter.com/wxdam/status/974045292420091905?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 14, 2018</a></p></blockquote>
<p>Kennedy also sent an outraged <a href="http://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/politics/article_cedb4a44-27ba-11e8-a98c-cfd6c1d77b03.html">letter</a> to United Airlines President J. Scott Kirby:</p>
<p style="margin-left:.5in;">According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, 18 of the 24 animals who died in major U.S. airlines’ care last year were in the care of United. Another 13 animals in United’s care suffered injuries last year. For comparison, Delta and American each reported two animal deaths. This pattern of animal deaths and injuries is simply inexcusable. For many people, pets are members of the family. They should not be treated like insignificant cargo. Frankly, they shouldn’t be placed in the cargo hold, much less an overhead bin.</p>
<p>But he sent no such letter to NRA President Wayne LaPierre. He could have said this:</p>
<p style="margin-left:.5in;">According to the Brady Campaign Against Gun Violence, on average, 17,102 teenagers and children <a href="http://www.bradycampaign.org/sites/default/files/Brady-Campaign-5Year-Gun-Deaths-Injuries-Stats_02-22-2018.pdf">are shot every year</a>; 2,737 die from their wounds. According to <em>The Washington Post</em>, 250 people have died in <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/02/14/eighteen-years-of-gun-violence-in-u-s-schools-mapped/?utm_term=.9d54f31585b5">school shootings</a> since 2000. By contrast, considerably fewer people in Canada and the United Kingdom die as a result of gun violence. This pattern of school shootings and injuries is simply unacceptable. Children are the future of the nation. They come to school to learn, not to be slaughtered. In fact, perhaps they should protest and walk out of school for an entire day if their elders cannot protect them.</p>
<p>Kennedy and his Republican confreres should focus on expediting legislation to help prevent more attacks against young people. Local officials and law enforcement can handle cruelty to domestic animals.</p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 16 Mar 2018 18:23:07 +0000229771 at http://prospect.orgGabrielle GurleyParkland Copycats Bide Their Timehttp://prospect.org/article/parkland-copycats-bide-their-time
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<p>Los Angeles County Sheriff Deputy Lisa Jansen sets up a picture at the Hall of Justice in Los Angeles on February 21, 2018, showing AR-15-type weapons and ammunition found at a student's home after he threatened a school shooting at El Camino High School in Whittier.</p>
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<p><span class="dropcap">I</span>n the wake of the Parkland massacre, amid the din of CNN town halls and CPAC chest-thumping, the copycats slink out. Every school shooting leads to an uptick in threats to schools. Police must investigate people who post <a href="https://gizmodo.com/man-arrested-for-instagram-photo-of-ar-15-captioned-thi-1823179856">photos of AR-15s</a> with callous captions on social media, along with students who think threatening a massacre is funny.</p>
<p>But there’s been little attention paid to the sum total of post-Parkdale disasters-in-the-making that have been prevented. Law enforcement officials responding to tips in multiple states have discovered caches of weapons in the homes of young men who have made threats against schools, some of them featuring the same AR-15 semi-automatics used in Parkland.</p>
<p>Some of the incidents since the February 14 shootings:</p>
<ul><li>A Whittier, California, school resource deputy heard a 17-year-old student say that “the school will be shot up in three weeks.” When sheriffs <a href="http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-whittier-school-shooting-plot-20180221-story.html">raided the teen’s home</a>, they found 90 high-capacity magazines, two handguns, and two semiautomatic AR-15s.</li>
<li>An 18-year-old Clarksburg, Maryland, high school student brought a knife and a <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/US/weapons-cache-found-home-md-teen-accused-bringing/story?id=53224189">loaded 9mm handgun</a> to school. When police <a href="http://www.bethesdamagazine.com/Bethesda-Beat/2018/Prosecutors-AR-15-Style-Rifle-Among-Weapons-Found-in-Home-of-Student-Who-Brought-Gun-to-Clarksburg-High-School/">raided his home</a>, they found an AR-15, several other weapons, along with a list he’d made of his issues with school.</li>
<li>During an investigation into a 17-year-old student’s threats to shoot up a Manistee County, Michigan, high school, sheriffs <a href="http://news.pioneergroup.com/manisteenews/2018/02/20/teen-arrested-threatening-shoot-school/">found an AR-15</a> in the young man’s home.</li>
<li>After an 18-year-old former student made threats against a Fair Haven, Vermont, high school, police <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/teenagers-arrest-liberal-vermont-ponders-gun-safety-232659061.html">discovered</a> that he had purchased a shotgun and ammunition, and had been recently released from a Maine mental health facility.</li>
<li>Riverdale County, Nevada, sheriffs arrested a 27-year-old man who had threatened to kill students at Norco College. They <a href="https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/crime_courts/2018/02/22/jacob-mcbain-school-shooting/363729002/">located</a> one loaded AR-15; two handguns, also loaded; and 510 rounds of ammunition.</li>
</ul><p>When a high school student with grievances can put an <a href="http://katv.com/news/local/arkansas-high-school-student-arrested-for-terroristic-threat-had-ar-15-on-layaway">AR-15 on layaway</a>—as one Arkansas high school student did two years ago—Congress has failed in its most basic responsibilities to the American people. By clinging to interpretations of the Second Amendment that have been discredited by every mass shooting, the senators and representatives overlook a key feature of the First Amendment: “the right of the people peaceably to assemble,” whether it’s to protest inaction by elected state representatives or to survive another school day.</p>
<p> </p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p dir="ltr" lang="en" xml:lang="en">Four times in the past decade, a federal appeals court has ruled that a ban on assault weapons was permissible under the Second Amendment. In fact, no federal appeals court has ever held that assault weapons are protected. <a href="https://t.co/DGfwPijV6t">https://t.co/DGfwPijV6t</a></p>
<p>— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) <a href="https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/966728056932065280?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 22, 2018</a></p></blockquote>
<script async="" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><p> </p>
<p>In the face of this latest national gun tragedy, Republican Second Amendment zealots continue to offer pointless remedies. President Trump calls for arming some teachers (a school officer armed with only a handgun did not enter the building during the Parkland shooting) and suddenly embraces the wisdom of a handful Obama-era measures—especially if he can claim credit for them.</p>
<p> </p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p dir="ltr" lang="en" xml:lang="en">I will be strongly pushing Comprehensive Background Checks with an emphasis on Mental Health. Raise age to 21 and end sale of Bump Stocks! Congress is in a mood to finally do something on this issue - I hope!</p>
<p>— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/966662241977360384?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 22, 2018</a></p></blockquote>
<script async="" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><p> </p>
<p>Meanwhile, the NRA proposes to turn school zones into <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/02/the-nras-plan-to-harden-schools-is-terrifying/">quasi-fortified,</a> mini Green Zones, reminiscent of the heavily armed Baghdad enclave that housed coalition forces and officials after the invasion of Iraq. </p>
<p>If guns are a public health problem, as many medical professionals argue, nothing short of an assault weapons ban will solve the school shootings crisis. Taking weapons of war out of the hands of civilians, especially those who may suffer from mental illnesses, is the only remedy to an untenable situation that brings out shooters and the people who would copy them.</p>
<p>There are effective ways to stem gun violence. If state and federal lawmakers continue to have trouble understanding the rudiments of their job, tens of thousands students will be marching on Washington in the coming weeks and some of them can probably make themselves available to tutor their elders.</p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 23 Feb 2018 15:22:07 +0000229632 at http://prospect.orgGabrielle GurleyQ&A: What Cities Can Do About the Gun Epidemichttp://prospect.org/article/qa-what-cities-can-do-about-gun-epidemic
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<p>Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter speaks in Washington</p>
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<p><span class="dropcap">I</span><em>n 2008, National Rifle Association sued Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, a Democrat, after he signed five new gun measures into law. A state court later upheld three provisions, but struck down the two strongest ones that limited gun purchases and banned the purchase and ownership of certain assault weapons. Although Nutter continued to take on state lawmakers over gun issues throughout his two terms, heavily Democratic Philadelphia must contend with Pennsylvania’s Republican-controlled General Assembly on a hot-button issue like gun safety. Pre-emption was one of the thorny issues that Nutter tackled during his two terms in office. </em></p>
<p><em>Nutter now teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia. He stopped by </em>The American Prospect<em>’s offices in downtown Washington to discuss his new book </em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0812250028/ref=rdr_ext_tmb">Mayor: The Best Job in Politics</a><em> with </em>Prospect<em> Deputy Editor Gabrielle Gurley. </em></p>
<p><em>This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.</em></p>
<p><strong>The American Prospect:</strong> You write that, “There is no reason for a civilian to have an automatic weapon. … I’m a big supporter of the Second Amendment, but I think I have a First Amendment right not to be shot.” How will the recent Florida school shootings affect the gun debate?</p>
<p><strong>Michael Nutter</strong>: First, elected officials express deep sorrow, horror, tons of prayers, condemnation of the person, we really need to be doing something about this. And then nothing. </p>
<p>I don’t understand how a 19 year old is able to purchase an AR-15. He said he bought it legally, there’s no issue there. I do not understand why any civilian would have a need for a weapon that is that very much similar to a weapon of war. In the aftermath of Florida, the autopsy documents from Las Vegas have been released. I truly believe that most Americans, starting with myself, do not fully understand the power of these weapons and what they actually do.</p>
<p>I want someone to tell me why that young man at Sandy Hook should have been able to use that kind of firepower with five- and six-year-olds. Have people lost their ability to imagine what a weapon like that would do to such a small child? It would tear their bodies apart.</p>
<p>The two events stand out to me where the media, and specifically, television, changed the course of events in American society: the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. People heard that things were bad down South. People were reading that there were really bad things; people were hearing things and all of that. When they saw the hoses, the beatings, the Pettus Bridge on what would have been for many people, starting with my own family, a relatively brand new device called a television in the home. And when people got a full grasp of what was going on down there, people said that’s not who we are; we need to change some things. And we did.</p>
<p><strong>Do people need to see what these weapons do to the human body?</strong></p>
<p>I don’t know that people understand what happens when one of these high velocity bullets hits a person’s body.</p>
<p><strong>So they should read the autopsy reports from Las Vegas.</strong></p>
<p>We see it with our soldiers: Why are many of them in the mental condition that they are in? It’s because of the things that they’ve seen in war. We’re confined to hear the news report from the very nice people on television; you read your paper; or listen to radio; go online. But you’re never going to really see what that kind of death and carnage looks like.</p>
<p><strong>Seeing that the carnage would make a difference in the debate over access to guns?</strong></p>
<p>I think it would as troubling as it is.</p>
<p><strong>How do mayors deal with these kinds events going forward?</strong></p>
<p>The first job of the mayor in that situation is try to convey a sense of not only sympathy and sorrow but also calm and stability. Somewhere between “things are OK,” and, “I am not trying to scare the hell out of you,” there is a space where you have to communicate with folks that yes, you know that this can possibly happen. In many instances, cities actually can’t really do anything about weapons. They’re often pre-empted by their states, Philadelphia being one. New York is not.</p>
<p><strong>You’ve been sued by the NRA.</strong></p>
<p>One of the proudest moments my entire political career.</p>
<p><strong>Why?</strong></p>
<p>I have been focused crime and safety and death and violence my entire life. My administration and working with the Philadelphia City Council we tried to do what we could do. One of the issues was a piece of legislation that said that if you are a responsible gun owner and if your weapon is lost or stolen, you should be required report it.</p>
<p>Of course, for the NRA and its supporters, any piece of legislation related to guns is all about the slippery slope. They argue that then you are going to take all of our guns away, which is one of the biggest lies ever that no one is actually talking about. But that is what they rally around.</p>
<p>That piece of legislation was introduced and a few other bills, a total package of five. I ran on a public safety platform and on my 100th day in office, I was sued by the NRA. The NRA is one of the most disingenuous and dangerous organizations in the United States of America. I do believe in the Second Amendment. I do believe in the individual right to enjoy the sport of hunting or target shooting or collecting.</p>
<p>I come from a state that has a huge NRA membership. In the western part of the state on the first day of hunting season, schools are closed. There is a huge tradition, which I deeply respect of parents and children. [When] they reach a certain age, where we might get a bicycle or something in the East as a teenager, that teenager in the West may get their first rifle. I’m OK with that—with training, programs, and understanding of what this weapon is and what it can do. But that’s not our issue in Philadelphia and most other small, medium, and large cities.</p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">Nobody is hunting in Philadelphia. They are shooting people. </span>They’re not target shooting. They’re after someone. They may not be friends but they’re known to each other. And they run all day shooting each other—with guns that they did not purchase in a store. So of all of those guns, almost every weapon we pick up is an illegal gun.</p>
<p><strong>Why is there is this deep disconnect of how to handle illegal firearms that are used to kill people and hunting? There have been many attempts to ban guns and take them off the streets in Philadelphia and Harrisburg says not so fast. </strong></p>
<p>It’s a close-minded viewpoint. We have 67 counties in Pennsylvania, so I understand that you don’t want to have 67 different schemes for how you are going to deal with weapons. When you look at the enormity of the problem—half of the homicides in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania are in Philadelphia.</p>
<p>Much like New York state has for New York City, if you care about people and you realize what’s going on here, you would in fact give the largest city in the state a little bit of leeway in terms of those issues. The city lost eight police officers killed in the line of duty, five by gunfire, the first by an AK-47. Why should that person have had an AK-47?</p>
<p>So the disconnect is, unfortunately, the NRA has been able—through contributions, political muscle, and public opinion—to shift the discussion from it’s not about gun safety; it’s all about taking guns away. They want to ignore the First Amendment, which is not just about free speech; it’s about freedom to assemble. Well, in many instances people have lost their freedom to assemble in many parts of the country because it’s so damn dangerous from people running around with illegal guns.</p>
<p><strong>What do blue cities in red states do about pre-emption?</strong></p>
<p>That tension is going to grow. The current issue is sanctuary cities and the immigration debate. You’ve got the federal government saying we’re not going to give you grants if you don’t basically abide by our rules and you have some states saying the same thing. Increasingly, cities may be in the position where they are going to have to sue their states or even the federal government for overreach, an exaggerated level of federalism that encroaches on the ability of mayors as executives to do what is in the best interest of their own citizens. You end up in the highest court in your state or it becomes a federal issue. </p>
<p><strong>When you were growing up in Philadelphia, it was essentially a Rust Belt city that had seen better days. Now Philadelphia is so cool, it’s made the shortlist for Amazon’s HQ2: What do you make of the kind of economic development competition that pits two of Pennsylvania’s two largest cities, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, against each other?</strong></p>
<p>It’s great to be on that list. It’s been great to raise the profile of cities like Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Erie, and a number of others. At some point, someone will win and 19 others won’t. Many of the things that they had to do to enter that competition let alone get on the shortlist of 20, many of those lessons and things that they did will help them going forward with other deals and other opportunities. Because when you have to do that kind of self-examination, asset scan, and relationship building, that’s going to help you in the future, regardless of what happens in this particular transaction. There will be other companies that might want to follow the same kind of process that Amazon has.</p>
<p><strong>But some cities view the competition a shakedown and say that Amazon really already knows the city they want. San Antonio did not enter a bid for Amazon’s HQ2: City leaders criticized the bidding war the company set up between cities.</strong></p>
<p>Folks have to live within their means, with all due respect to Amazon. The city still has to be able to function and operate—unless Amazon is going to help with day-to-day services and the like. You want to make sure that you are not in a situation where you are a one-and-done, that you’ve given every possible thing to one company, leaving your coffers totally depleted and unable to ever attract anyone else. That seems to me to make no sense whatsoever and hopefully no one will do that. Amazon is in a position where they can ask for certain things. But the prospect of putting down a campus with 50,000 jobs—that’s a pretty serious proposition. </p>
<p>The issue though, is who will fill those jobs? Are they looking in places where the opportunity to significantly bring along residents and nearby residents who really need a job, really want a job, and also may not necessarily have all the skill sets required for those 50,000 jobs. That conversation has to be a part of the equation.</p>
<p>In a city like Philadelphia, given the high poverty rate and the high level of unemployment, especially for African American and Latino men, we would have to be in a very serious conversation—if I were involved, which I am not. But if I were still in office, we would have to have a very serious conversation about the “who” of those 50,000 jobs.</p>
<p><strong>Amazon could also accelerate gentrification, too. How do you keep the neighborhoods intact for the people who live there, so that they aren’t pushed out by wealthier newcomers?</strong></p>
<p>You want to be open and welcoming and have a mix of incomes, races, genders, and preferences—that does make for a very healthy neighborhood. On the other hand, the folks who have been holding down the fort waiting for the cavalry to come, if you will, should not be forced out of their own community where they’ve lived for 20, 30, 40, 50 years. Rising property values overall are always a good thing, and a sign of a healthy market. But as my grandmother used to say, you can be house rich and cash poor. The value of your house has nothing to do with your ability to actually pay your taxes.</p>
<p>People will say they bought this house in 1958 for the then-exorbitant price of $40,000—now it is worth whatever it’s worth and now I can’t afford to live here. When we fixed our property assessment system, which was not capturing anywhere near the value that it should have been from certain neighborhoods and certain types of households, we realized that in many instances, lower-income people were actually paying more than they should have been and upper-income people were paying much less. We balanced that out. But we also realized that long-term owner occupied properties really needed some extra protection, so we created a program to deal with that.</p>
<p>As a leader, you have to pay attention to these issues and be mindful that every deal is not a great deal; every piece of land doesn’t have to have a building on it. <span class="pullquote-right">How you manage growth is critically important.</span></p>
<p><strong>The GOP’s new tax laws and President Trump’s latest budget proposal are hard on cities. Can they adapt to a leaner fiscal environment?</strong></p>
<p>Cities are going to be heavily dependent on saner voices in Congress—both Democrats and Republican—to protect us, if you will. It seems almost like disdain that the White House has for cities. I don’t recall any positive comments that Trump has ever made about a city.</p>
<p><strong>Cities are economic engines in states and for the country overall, but you have a New Yorker who disdains them.</strong></p>
<p>He doesn’t understand how cities work; he doesn’t understand their value or what they do. He’s a real estate guy. My best sense is what he understood how to do <em>his</em> deals for his private company. It was basically all about what he could get.</p>
<p>Donald Trump doesn’t understand that in the president’s role, often the greatest successes are from what you can give and how you can support these small, medium, and large cities, rural communities, and suburbs all across the U.S. He is not a student of government; he seems to have no appreciation for government. The most dangerous person is the person that thinks he knows everything and actually knows very little and surrounds himself with people who don’t know or understand either.</p>
<p>That’s where you get wacky ideas like: We did this big tax cut and now we need to save money so now we are going to go after the <a href="https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/supplemental-nutrition-assistance-program-snap">SNAP program</a>. Or everybody is going to get a daily box of food with stuff that he would never eat himself.</p>
<p>They are trying a bait-and-switch approach on the transportation and infrastructure proposal, where the formula currently is 80 percent by the feds and 20 percent state and local. They literally want to turn that on its head and go 20 percent feds and 80 percent state and local. That’s a disaster for cities.</p>
<p>There is going to be a level of antagonism and conflict growing between cities and the federal government. You are going to see more strong, strident, aggressive leadership by mayors—Democrats and Republicans—pushing back on the ideas that would be devastating.</p>
<p>What the president doesn’t understand is that it’s fine you are the president of the United States of America, but in their own local media markets, the mayors are the dominant force. They have the closest relationship with people: It’s not philosophical or party platform, it’s practical.</p>
<p>The job is so personal with the public. If I’ve got 15 inches of snow on the ground, I can’t go make a speech about it. People want to know when are you going to send a plow down my street. If you are not having that conversation you’re not talking about anything, right? It’s a very different job. You will find a whole bunch of Republican mayors who are strong supporters of HUD and think that the community block grant program is the best money that cities ever got. They understand that.</p>
<p><strong>You write that people aren’t paying attention to politics because they have real lives. Given what has happened in the country over the past year, will people pay closer attention?</strong></p>
<p>We have been watching this train wreck for some time. There’s a phrase now, “stay woke.” A lot more folks are seeing and understanding the consequences of elections, not voting, and not being engaged. It would have made that much more difference in Virginia [in 2017]. Democrats go from one vote up [in the legislature] then to one vote down, then to a tie. Then, we are flipping coins. We flip coins at football games, not to decide elections. </p>
<p>People are really waking up to what’s going on that this is what happens when you’re not engaged. A showman, a carnival barker, a TV character could vanquish 16 serious people on the Republican side. A good portion of the American public is so angry and so upset about so many different things. But there is a lack of honesty about what’s really going on.</p>
<p>Coal is not coming back. All the jobs did not go to China and Mexico: some of you lost your jobs to a robot, a mechanical arm that does not go on vacation; need a break; is not subject to various rules and regulations; and works weekends for free. Members of Congress are raising money all the time and rarely talking to each other in D.C. They are desperately clinging to and holding on to power. The Republican Senate will do anything to maintain that majority. Having new people running for office is critical; winning is even more critical. We at least have to be able to slow this train down. </p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 16 Feb 2018 19:46:44 +0000229576 at http://prospect.orgGabrielle GurleyParading into a Cataclysmhttp://prospect.org/article/parading-cataclysm
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<p>North Korean soldiers march during a military parade on February 8, 2018, in Pyongyang to mark the 70th anniversary of the founding of the military.</p>
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<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>he 45th president of the United States craves a military parade in the nation’s capital. Most presidential inaugural parades feature hundreds of members of the armed forces along with school bands and civic groups. But the 2017 fete clearly was not enough of an ego-booster for the new president. Unique among recent commanders-in-chief, Donald Trump has an unhealthy fixation on soldiering and levying deadly threats.</p>
<p>Should a military parade ever come to fruition, it would be intended to be a psy-ops spectacle—one designed to rouse Americans to rally against a one-of-a-kind foreign threat: North Korea. Trump desperately wants a face-off between <em>his</em> armed forces (and he clearly believes they are his to use as he sees fit) and those belonging to his designated adversary of the moment, Kim Jong-Un. The former reality television star understands which buttons to push and which symbols to deploy—and a parade’s the thing.</p>
<p>Trump’s reckless bellicosity comes at a curious time in the steadily deteriorating dialogue between Kim and Trump. On Thursday, the eve of the Winter Olympics in South Korea, the volatile leader of the Hermit Kingdom’ showcased <em>his</em> soldiers (no one inside or outside North Korea debates that point) and weapons to mark the 70th anniversary of the creation of the country’s military.</p>
<p> </p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p dir="ltr" lang="en" xml:lang="en">North Korea just held a massive military parade ahead of the Olympics in South Korea, showcasing missiles, tanks and thousands of troops <a href="https://t.co/qmSviIcn4m">https://t.co/qmSviIcn4m</a> <a href="https://t.co/q39k0ChuAy">pic.twitter.com/q39k0ChuAy</a></p>
<p>— CNN (@CNN) <a href="https://twitter.com/CNN/status/961689025076715520?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 8, 2018</a></p></blockquote>
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<p>Despite Trump’s oft-expressed desire to emulate France’s Bastille Day military extravaganza, the images of that North Korean parade likely impressed the president.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, Americans opposed to Trump will have to tread carefully on the subject. Such overt displays of military power are antithetical to the American political ethos.</p>
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p dir="ltr" lang="en" xml:lang="en">"To have a military parade without the end of a war or an inaugural or some big reason in Washington, D.C., that is out of our tradition," presidential historian Michael Beschloss told NPR.<a href="https://t.co/fLqxZbyFMs">https://t.co/fLqxZbyFMs</a></p>
<p>— All Things Considered (@npratc) <a href="https://twitter.com/npratc/status/961653358980247552?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 8, 2018</a></p></blockquote>
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<p>But a substantial number of Americans will welcome them, and some of the president’s supporters will be eager to charge parade opponents with insufficient patriotism. The parade reeks of a dress rehearsal for the kind of power that Trump would like to wield: undisputed control of the instruments of war, which can be deployed at a time of his choosing (as would be the case if he ruled North Korea).</p>
<p>Trump can choreograph his own patriotic displays. But on North Korea, he is also trotting out supporters who can buttress his desire for pageantry and tough talk with their own foreign policy credentials. Into this quagmire steps former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who serves as a de facto adviser to the president on China and North Korea. In a late January appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Kissinger <a href="https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Kissinger_01-25-18.pdf">weighed in</a> on the threat posed by North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. In his prepared statement, Kissinger counseled that “the ultimate goal” on the Korean Peninsula must be “the dismantlement of Pyongyang’s existing arsenal.” He later told the committee, “The temptation to deal with it with a preemptive attack is strong and the argument is rational.”</p>
<p>Kissinger’s advice still holds sway in some quarters on Capitol Hill, but his impact on the thinking of ordinary Americans is negligible. A parade with all the patriotic trimmings Trump can muster, by contrast, could serve as a useful tool in persuading at least some Americans to get behind the wars to come. But Trump’s posturing on North Korea glosses over the cataclysm that would be unleashed by a nuclear first strike. A mid-January <em>Washington Post</em>-ABC News poll found that 60 percent of those surveyed did not trust Trump to “handle this authority responsibly.”</p>
<p>Trump’s most formidable challenge will be one that parading the troops cannot resolve. The question is whether the president can succeed in ginning up support in the Defense Department for a mammoth display of military might that many people find questionable, particularly given the myriad issues faced by American soldiers: low pay, multiple deployments, PTSD, suicide, and homelessness, to name just a few.</p>
<p>An informal survey of more than 80,000 <em>Military Times</em> readers suggests that a parade will be a hard sell among the very people Trump purports to hold in high esteem.</p>
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p dir="ltr" lang="en" xml:lang="en">89% of respondents to our informal poll were against a military parade like the one requested by President Trump <a href="https://t.co/Em12tn1FPt">https://t.co/Em12tn1FPt</a> <a href="https://t.co/jmK59b1zVg">pic.twitter.com/jmK59b1zVg</a></p>
<p>— Military Times (@MilitaryTimes) <a href="https://twitter.com/MilitaryTimes/status/961919900745961472?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 9, 2018</a></p></blockquote>
<script async="" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><p> </p>
<p>“There's nobody bigger or better at the military than I am,” Trump declared in 2015. Yet, Trump fails to appreciate that military parades occur all over the country several times a year on Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Veterans Day. They are mostly modest affairs to honor sacrifices, and parade-goers accept them as such. They are not multimillion-dollar productions to stoke enthusiasm for future conflicts, as demanded by a man who turned down five opportunities to serve his country during the last big Asian quagmire.</p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 09 Feb 2018 17:49:00 +0000229521 at http://prospect.orgGabrielle GurleyNot a Drill: Oil and Gas Exploration Dead in the Water for Governorshttp://prospect.org/article/not-drill-oil-and-gas-exploration-dead-water-governors
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<p>Florida Governor Rick Scott and U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke announce there will be no new offshore drilling in the State of Florida</p>
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<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>he Trump administration’s <a href="https://www.boem.gov/NP-Draft-Proposed-Program-2019-2024/">draft five-year plan</a> for leasing most continental shelf areas for oil and gas drilling met with equal parts of horror and consternation from most Republican and Democratic coastal governors. “Responsibly developing our energy resources on the Outer Continental Shelf in a safe and well-regulated way is important to our economy and energy security, and it provides billions of dollars to fund the conservation of our coastlines, public lands, and parks,” Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said in a January statement announcing the plan. (Note that safety has been the least of the administration’s concerns: Zinke had already rolled back Obama-era offshore drilling safety regulations in late December.) </p>
<p>So fearful was Republican Governor Rick Scott of Florida of this plan that he plunged into the fray and cut his own deal with the Interior Department to protect the Sunshine State’s multibillion-dollar tourist industry. Scott extracted a waiver from Interior that would exempt the state’s coastal waters from offshore exploration all the way through a possible Trump second term. Though President Trump apparently <a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/368208-zinke-to-take-florida-out-of-offshore-drilling-plan">complained</a> about the move, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s decision no doubt suited Mar-a-Lago’s weekender-in-chief just fine.</p>
<p>Although a coup for a red state Republican governor with U.S. Senate dreams, Scott’s cynical ploy galvanized his colleagues against drilling. The governors of Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Virginia—three Republicans and four Democrats—<a href="https://governor.nc.gov/news/governor-cooper-joins-governors-letter-opposing-offshore-drilling">signed a joint letter</a> in mid-January opposing the plan and complicating the administration’s calculations by requesting a Sunshine State style-exemption.</p>
<p>Republican Governor Charlie Baker of Massachusetts emerged as a vocal proponent of building that rarest of entities, a bipartisan gubernatorial coalition to oppose the president’s designs rather taking an every-state-for-itself approach. “I’ve done it on my own, I know the [congressional] delegation has done it on their own,” Baker <a href="http://www.wgbh.org/programs/Boston-Public-Radio-Podcast-2895?episode=72594">said</a> Monday on a Boston public radio talk show. “But I would like to see if we can’t bring some of the other Republican and Democrat governors along and maybe with them with [congressional] delegations along up and down the East Coast.”</p>
<p>Baker added, “while the argument here about [offshore drilling] is the possibility and the opportunity associated with an economic policy … there are also big economic issues here and not just for us.” He continued, “if you think about the coastal states … many of them have very active, important economic interests that are related to the continued ability to work collaboratively with others on scalloping, lobstering, crabbing and fishing, and recreational activity.”</p>
<p>Baker has apparently decided that he can now afford to stick his neck out on energy and the environment. Although the former health-care industry executive and other governors jockeying behind the scenes failed to persuade Congress to come up with an Affordable Care Act compromise, the purple wall of opposition rising against the offshore drilling means that he can assume a higher profile national role in a fight against Trump.</p>
<p>Although only Baker and six colleagues signed the January letter, all of the other eastern seaboard governors save the departing Republican Governor Paul LePage of Maine, a Trump stalwart, and Republican Governor Nathan Deal of Georgia, who supports the move but has environmental concerns, have come out forcefully against the federal proposal.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p dir="ltr" lang="en" xml:lang="en">Trump Administration proposes to open offshore drilling but faces opposition from many coastal state governors... <a href="https://t.co/aOqiz4Vovq">https://t.co/aOqiz4Vovq</a> <a href="https://t.co/wTJljbNzyU">pic.twitter.com/wTJljbNzyU</a></p>
<p>— green|spaces (@greenspacescha) <a href="https://twitter.com/greenspacescha/status/958465243256098816?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 30, 2018</a></p></blockquote>
<p>Areas off Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, California, and Alaska currently are open to drilling. Yet even the Last Frontier supports drilling in only certain areas and <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-drilling-offshore/alaska-becomes-latest-state-to-request-limits-on-u-s-offshore-drilling-idUSKBN1FJ2QY">opposes</a> opening up other wide swaths of coastal waters to new exploration.</p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">Drumming up offshore drilling support in reliably sites red states may not be as easy as Trump’s Interior Department supposes. </span>An interesting test for the president is unfolding in South Carolina where Republican Governor Henry McMaster and former Governor Mark Sanford (now on Capitol Hill representing South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District) are both firmly opposed. There has also been vigorous <a href="https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/feature/southern-revolt-against-offshore-oil-drilling">pushback</a> particularly from small business owners in the tourism and seafood industries.</p>
<p>With so many states clamoring for exemptions, the Trump administration’s decision to capitulate to Florida, with the taint of presidential self interest permeating the deal, the Interior Department may have a tough time explaining in the inevitable court battles ahead why Florida was only the coastal state to merit this carve-out.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p dir="ltr" lang="en" xml:lang="en">Adding insult to injury, the Trump admin is proposing to rollback vital offshore oil and gas protections at the same time it is discussing a plan to radically expand the scope of offshore drilling.<br /><br />Read our comments to <a href="https://twitter.com/Interior?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@Interior</a>: <a href="https://t.co/JxFnY4ezZd">https://t.co/JxFnY4ezZd</a> <a href="https://t.co/fojtQEwXOz">pic.twitter.com/fojtQEwXOz</a></p>
<p>— Eric Schneiderman (@AGSchneiderman) <a href="https://twitter.com/AGSchneiderman/status/958466521826824192?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 30, 2018</a></p></blockquote>
<p>The debate over offshore oil and gas drilling is the first major clash of the Trump-inspired energy-environmental wars. This battle doesn’t just pit the states against the federal government; it also pits the fossil fuel actors that quickly seized the regulatory levers of government against the renewable energy forces that were empowered during the Obama years. Unlike the new federal centurions, governors in Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, and elsewhere have firmly embraced renewable energy in the oceans in the form of wind farms.</p>
<p>Turbines are not benign; they come with their own environmental negatives as any ornithologist can attest. But they are unlikely to produce the kind of environmental devastation that a Deepwater Horizon-style oil spill can unleash, or produce the greenhouse gases that imperil life on Earth.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p dir="ltr" lang="en" xml:lang="en"><a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/OffshoreDrilling?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#OffshoreDrilling</a> does not belong on Washington coasts. Join fishing, tourism, business, faith, tribal, and conservation leaders working to <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/ProtectOurCoast?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#ProtectOurCoast</a> on Monday in Tacoma! <a href="https://t.co/nRvfDTq6Yy">https://t.co/nRvfDTq6Yy</a> <a href="https://t.co/cJ00mcgOuz">pic.twitter.com/cJ00mcgOuz</a></p>
<p>— Stand Up To Oil (@StandUpToOil) <a href="https://twitter.com/StandUpToOil/status/959158616014991360?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 1, 2018</a></p></blockquote>
<p>Governors are never disinterested actors but the statewide grand coalitions of politicians, environmentalists, business people, and ordinary citizens that are emerging are early signs that effective pressures can be brought to bear even on an administration that has been impervious to compromise, science, or technology. The president can rail about the opposition of the “coastal elites” to his energy policies. He can ignore the natural environment. But he should not underestimate the psychic pull of the seashore for coastal Americans. It won’t be difficult for to rally these denizens to protect their unique ecological heritage.</p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 02 Feb 2018 16:37:06 +0000229467 at http://prospect.orgGabrielle GurleyHudson River Tunnel Supporter Bites the Dusthttp://prospect.org/blog/tapped/hudson-river-tunnel-supporter-bites-dust
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Democrats do get excited over Republican retirements. As things stand now in New Jersey, full of people incensed by President Trump and recently departed GOP Governor Chris Christie, the 11th Congressional District, a longtime Republican stronghold, may turn blue in the fall. </p>
<p>But for commuters and travelers wanting to get from New Jersey to New York, it’s tough to be completely enthused about <a href="https://frelinghuysen.house.gov/top-news/statement-of-representative-rodney-p-frelinghuysen-nj11/">the departure</a> of Republican House Appropriations Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen, who this week announced he wouldn’t run for re-election in New Jersey’s 11th.</p>
<p>Even with more conservative Republicans accusing Frelinghuysen of flirting with earmarks, the 12-term Republican somehow managed to secure hundreds of millions in funding for the Gateway Program—the $30 billion infrastructure project to replace and upgrade the 19th century cross-Hudson antiques that currently connect the two states.</p>
<p>Doing away with earmarks seemed a good idea to Republicans and some pliable Democrats back in the sands of time (2010 to be exact). But living without earmarks—a convention that forced members of Congress to give in order to get—has pretty much turned the body into a hornets’ nest of aging Republicans refighting sectional battles: sticking it to the so-called coastal elites and steering funds that could build tunnels and bridges between New Jersey and New York (and more than a few other places) into tax cuts for their campaign donors.</p>
<p>Frelinghuysen may have violated Republican orthodoxy by working with Democrats to secure funding for the tunnels and voting against the GOP tax plan (which clearly penalized his New Jersey constituents). But one of the wealthiest men in Congress went wobbly on the Affordable Care Act, which he voted to repeal (despite his initial opposition to the repeal-and-replace effort); earned his constituents’ wrath for not holding town hall meetings; and sparked NJ 11th for Change, a <a href="http://www.nj11thforchange.org/">fired-up grassroots movement</a> dedicated to throwing him out of Congress<em>.</em></p>
<p>In the end, he couldn’t deliver for the Hudson tunnels, either. At the end of December, Frelinghuysen got royally screwed over by the president, who <a href="http://theprosp.ec/2DtsMBL">elected not to support</a> the Obama administration’s Gateway funding program after all. It will likely require a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress—which might well include a Democratic successor to Frelinghuysen—to come up with the funds for the tunnels.</p>
<p>The seat has been in the hands of Republican since 1985, and Hillary Clinton lost the district by only one percentage point in 2016. The 11th Congressional District, a wealthy, moderate, suburban area outside New York City, could be a good get for the blue team this fall: Already two Democratic women <a href="http://www.newjerseyhills.com/crowd-starts-forming-for-frelinghuysen-s-congressional-seat/article_eebc8613-5dcf-5ee1-bf07-e97d5f90851a.html">are in the race</a> to succeed Frelinghuysen. </p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 31 Jan 2018 19:01:28 +0000229446 at http://prospect.orgGabrielle GurleyInfrastructure, Immigration, and Trump’s War on Citieshttp://prospect.org/article/infrastructure-immigration-and-trumps-war-on-cities
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<p>Trump speaks to mayors in the East Room of the White House on January 24, 2018.</p>
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<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>he Master of Distraction has done it again. America’s trillion-dollar infrastructure crisis will never get the concentrated attention from the White House that it desperately requires, because the president of the United States enjoys poisoning the American body politic with divisive scapegoating. This week’s target: big-city mayors.</p>
<p>When he was running for president, Trump inveighed against the country’s Third-World airports, rail, and other emblems of national decay. In his first year in the White House, however, he has dodged and weaved away from any decisive action on the issue. Infrastructure has been lost in the hostage negotiations that pass for legislative deliberations over immigration, taxes, and health care. State and local leaders have endured unprecedented procrastination from the administration as they try to read between the lines of memos and vague speeches.</p>
<p>Trump avoids constructive engagement even when opportunity walks straight into the White House in the form of mayors in Washington for a U.S. Conference of Mayors’ winter meeting. The local leaders, who traditionally hear from the president, were eager to participate in a “working session,” with infrastructure at the top of the agenda. The fact that the Justice Department sent out letters threatening sanctuary cities and their mayors with subpoenas on the same day as the meeting wasn’t exactly throwing out the welcome mat.</p>
<p>When he did address the mayors, Trump <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-working-session-mayors/">reviewed</a> the greatest hits of his first year, punctuated by grade-school-worthy patter about sanctuary cities being “best friends of gangs and cartels like MS-13.” The president castigated Toni Harp, the black mayor of New Haven, Connecticut, as a “sanctuary city person.” She took a pass on the White House meeting, as did Bill de Blasio of New York, Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles, Mitch Landrieu of New Orleans, Rahm Emmanuel of Chicago, and many others. Instead of offering details about his year-in-the-making infrastructure proposal, Trump offered more vague teasers. (“We’ll be talking about it a little bit in the State of the Union.”)</p>
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p dir="ltr" lang="en" xml:lang="en">Rahm told us the WH blew up the mayors meeting with POTUS with sanctuary cities announcement because “the emperor has no clothes when it comes to infrastructure” - the issue mayors wanted to discuss with him. <a href="https://t.co/X9YrFP4Sbc">https://t.co/X9YrFP4Sbc</a></p>
<p>— Jonathan Allen (@jonallendc) <a href="https://twitter.com/jonallendc/status/956280138261516289?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 24, 2018</a></p></blockquote>
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<p>The little that local leaders know about the president’s infrastructure intentions comes courtesy of an undated <a href="https://www.axios.com/draft-white-house-infrastructure-plan-1516644555-0d43f417-6ccd-43f7-9eae-3ccbe711314d.html">outline</a> obtained by Axios. The plan, as reported, would chiefly foment more discord along the urban-rural divide. The competition between America’s cities and rural lands has been at the core of the American identity ever since Thomas Jefferson went up against Alexander Hamilton in the struggle for economic and political power between the agrarian slaveholding South and the nascent financial and industrial sectors in the North. But Trump has a knack for stoking these historic tensions, and the 21st-century infrastructure debate is the latest round in America’s rural-urban wars.</p>
<p>The leaked memo does not hold any great promise for cities. And yet the so-called “rural infrastructure program” mentioned in the memo (which would receive 25 percent of a total infrastructure appropriation) is deceptive: States would be “incentivized to partner with local and private investment for completion and operation of projects.” But most private investors who explore public-sector partnerships want a significant return on their investment. Most rural projects would not generate a high level of profits.</p>
<p>The biggest problem for cities comes from a radical shift in funding. Conservatives have long supported forcing localities to shoulder more of the fiscal burden for mass transit and kindred projects. In recent decades, the federal government has paid for 80 percent of these developments. Under the reported proposal, the federal government would reverse that ratio, providing only 20 percent of the funding, while municipalities somehow come up with 80 percent. That could grind urban infrastructure development to a halt: Most smaller cities have trouble coming up with the 20 percent match, much less an 80 percent requirement.</p>
<p>The doubts and misgivings about the (presumably) forthcoming infrastructure proposal have only been compounded by the recent tax overhaul, which has taken so much federal revenue off the table. <span class="pullquote-right">What is clear is that the Trump administration wants to recast American federalism: Localities would have to shoulder more of the fiscal burden, with the private sector rendering a substantial assist.</span></p>
<p>At least, that’s the theory. In practice, the reversal of the 80-20 division could simply dry up most major urban infrastructure projects, as part of Trump’s war on urban America—which voted heavily for Hillary Clinton in 2016.</p>
<p>Trump’s sanctuary city tantrum may also signal that his administration is contemplating some type of immigration enforcement–infrastructure dollars quid pro quo. To be sure, federal courts have already ruled that the administration cannot impose new requirements for federal grants that have not been approved by Congress. (The Supreme Court <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/09/15/federal-court-rules-against-part-of-trump-administration-effort-to-target-sanctuary-cities/?utm_term=.76d3ac960618">has also underlined</a> the same principles.) But that hasn’t allayed the fears that some mayors harbor. </p>
<p>“He might use that as leverage—we’ve certainly seen some foreshadowing of that,” says Mayor Steve Adler of Austin, Texas, who spoke to <em>The American Prospect</em> at a Center for American Progress forum on Trump’s tax and infrastructure plans.</p>
<p>“The government isn’t allowed to coerce behavior in certain programs by denying programs and benefits in other areas to cities,” Adler continued. “Fortunately, cities are protected against that and we would defend that in court if we needed to.”</p>
<p>But Trump has never let settled legal questions stand in the way of scoring political points. Despite the president’s complaints about the Third World state of the nation’s transportation networks and other vital components of its infrastructure, it’s his policies and his rhetoric that threaten to turn America into a shithole country. The nation’s mayors must anticipate that their cities, and the immigrants who live there, will continue to be the subject not of the president’s concern, but of his attacks.</p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 26 Jan 2018 19:58:28 +0000229413 at http://prospect.orgGabrielle GurleyGateway To Nowhere on the Hudsonhttp://prospect.org/article/gateway-nowhere-on-hudson
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><em>On December 29, 2017, the Trump administration announced that it had no intention of upholding Obama administration’s unofficial agreement to pay 50 percent of the cost of the Gateway Program, a slew of infrastructure improvements, including a new cross-Hudson rail tunnel between New York and New Jersey. “We consider it unhelpful to reference a nonexistent 'agreement' rather than directly address the responsibility for funding a local project where 9 out of 10 passengers are local transit riders,” K. Jane Williams, the Federal Transit Department’s Deputy Administrator <a href="http://www.crainsnewyork.com/assets/pdf/CN1137151229.PDF'">informed</a> state and program officials.</em></p>
<p><em>The news was as welcome as snakes let loose in Times Square ten minutes before midnight. Democratic New York Governor Andrew Cuomo stayed mum; a spokesman for departing New Jersey Governor Chris Christie remained “confident.” Which left Republican Representative Rodney Frelinghuysen to state the obvious: "There has long been agreement among federal, state, and local officials that the Gateway project is an urgent national infrastructure priority."</em></p>
<p><em>But there were signals that all was not well on the funding front. Just two weeks earlier, after the two governors <a href="http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20171214/POLITICS/171219924">agreed</a> to secure a 35-year, nearly $2 billion federal loan to finance their portion of the project, a Trump official pronounced the effort “entirely unserious.”</em></p>
<p><em>The Trump administration can scarcely pull together the scaffolding for an infrastructure plan, much less money for Gateway, despite Trump’s own claims of support. Details and deadlines for the great infrastructure reveal shift again and again. Despite being an “urgent national infrastructure priority,” the troubled Gateway Program continues to be held hostage to partisan political jockeying. But the White House and Congress aren’t only ones stalling. With a mega-project like Gateway, there’s plenty of blame to go from Washington to Trenton and Albany and back again.</em></p>
<p><em>This article appears in the Winter 2018 issue of </em>The American Prospect <em>magazine. <a href="http://www.prospect.org/subscribe">Subscribe here</a>. </em></p>
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<p><span class="dropcap">E</span>verybody was in the room where it happened. Shortly after Labor Day, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer went to the White House to talk trains and tunnels with President Trump. Present were two junior senators, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Cory Booker of New Jersey; New York and New Jersey representatives; and Governors Chris Christie of New Jersey and Andrew Cuomo of New York. The president’s key people were there, too: Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao; John Kelly, the president’s chief of staff; Gary Cohn, the chief economic adviser; and Mick Mulvaney, the budget director.</p>
<p>New York and New Jersey had secured a pledge from the Obama administration for federal funding to cover half the cost of the Gateway Program, estimated to be up to a $30 billion undertaking to rebuild and replace the more than century-old rail, tunnel, and bridge networks that move people between New York City and northern New Jersey, and up and down the spine of the Northeast from Boston to Washington.</p>
<p>In the wake of Christie’s 2010 veto of the $9 billion Access to the Region’s Core (ARC) project, the Obama administration ultimately pledged to move ahead with the broader Gateway project. But Trump is methodically dismantling anything remotely redolent of the first African American president’s legacy.</p>
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<p>Although preliminary construction on the Hudson River tunnels has already begun, completing the project could take more than a decade. </p>
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<p>The country’s largest metropolitan region is at risk of massive gridlock if a rail shutdown or slowdown forces riders to pile into vehicles and onto the congested roads into New York City and the highways between the New England and mid-Atlantic states. As long-suffering air passengers in and out of LaGuardia Airport can attest, plane travel is not a good substitute either.</p>
<p>Republicans spun the White House Gateway meeting as a positive step. Cuomo found it “productive” but “inconclusive,” leaving Booker to underscore the obvious: “President Trump,” the senator said in a statement, “has made plenty of promises on infrastructure, which so far have fallen flat.” More likely the meeting was another set piece of political theater.</p>
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<p><strong>THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION</strong> has no comprehensive infrastructure policy, and no commitment to seek the appropriations that Gateway requires. The administration sent Congress a budget plan that zeroes out important sources of funding for Gateway. The $1.5 trillion tax cut will only add to these fiscal pressures.</p>
<p>William Howard Taft was president when the original Pennsylvania Station and the Hudson River Tunnel opened nearly 110 years ago. Today, the tunnels are decaying monuments to America’s failure, unique among the world’s developed countries, to continue to invest and maintain its public transportation assets. Hurricane Sandy inundated those tunnels for the first time in history, closing them for days and leaving behind a residue that continues to eat away at the concrete and steel—making Gateway more urgent, if remote, than ever.</p>
<p>Rail has advantages over the region’s perpetually clogged highways and congested airports. But delays, derailments, fires, and other hazards turn New York–area rail travel into a journey of existential frustration for the commuters and visitors who also endure Penn Station’s mobbed concourses, dank passageways, and sour waiting areas.</p>
<p>“For the average New Yorker, whether it’s Gateway or subways, all of the region-wide breakdowns in infrastructure are all of a piece,” says John Raskin, executive director of the Riders Alliance, a New York City transit advocacy group. “A breakdown at Penn Station or in a tunnel under the Hudson River is part of the story that is the same story as subway malfunctions and other infrastructure failures that come from decades of under-investment.”</p>
<p>The Northeast Corridor economy generates $3 trillion, roughly one-fifth of the country’s gross domestic product. For area workers, Manhattan is the obvious choice—wages in every sector are higher than elsewhere in the region. But Manhattan is punishingly expensive to live in, and commuting is a way of life.</p>
<p>An August 2017 report published by the Regional Plan Association, a New York-New Jersey-Connecticut economic research organization, calculated that rail trips in and out of Penn Station have tripled in the past 25 years. The RPA projects that work trips will continue to increase by 2040. Much of the travel between New York and Boston or Washington is done on Amtrak, as air travel has fallen out of favor for short hauls.</p>
<p>Gateway is crucial for modernizing the Hudson River tunnels that Amtrak owns and operates. Preliminary construction has already begun. Once the new tunnel opens, the original tunnels would be closed and rebuilt. Amtrak officials conduct regular inspections and monitor the condition of the saltwater-compromised concrete. But constructing the new tunnel could take up to a decade.</p>
<p>The tunnel comprises just one component of the Gateway program. There are eight other projects, including building new bridges to replace the Portal Bridge, another century-old span (which opens for ships and sometimes gets stuck open). Penn Station, the busiest in North America, needs a total overhaul and is also part of the Gateway rebuilding. The upgrades affect Amtrak, along with the Long Island Rail Road—operated by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), New York City’s regional network—and New Jersey Transit, the statewide commuter rail network.</p>
<p>But there is no discernable Plan B to replace federal funding. Private industry would be unwilling to take on all the risks—even public-private partnerships depend on government dollars. <span class="pullquote">Building a new rail tunnel and related infrastructure is simply too big and expensive a feat to pull off without some help from Washington</span>—even for well-off states like New Jersey and New York.</p>
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<p><strong>DELAYED INFRASTRUCTURE</strong> spending for metropolitan New York is now complicated by Trump, but the current inertia has deeper roots in the personality clashes, parochial turf battles, and competing priorities of the two states. In the United States, New Jersey has the most denizens crossing state lines for work, and most of them head to New York jobs. Hundreds of thousands of people swarm through Penn Station every weekday, most of them via commuter rail or subway lines. But there are no votes for New York politicians in New Jersey, and cross-river projects perceived to benefit New Jersey residents typically get short shrift.</p>
<p>“New York is very different from every other region because there is no one government agency that does any kind of regional planning,” says Philip Mark Plotch, a former MTA planning manager and assistant professor of political science at Saint Peter’s University in Jersey City. So New Jersey and New York governors take care of their own.</p>
<p>Although the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey comes the closest to being a regional agency, Plotch adds, it has its own priorities and interests. The authority oversees a roster of transportation networks, including airports, bridges, tunnels, ports, the Port Authority Trans-Hudson (PATH) commuter rail network, and the World Trade Center complex.</p>
<p>Through the Port Authority, Christie and Cuomo enjoyed a transactional relationship. While the agency had been created to provide an efficient framework to build, operate, and maintain major transportation assets, it has long since morphed into a soft landing space for political cronies of governors. It also served as a kitty to fund pet projects that governors could not finance elsewhere in their states’ budgets.</p>
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<p>Like his fellow conservative Republican governors, Chris Christie took great pride in deep-sixing public transit projects. </p>
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<p>It further served as a vehicle for political payback. The 2013 Bridgegate scandal featuring Christie’s Port Authority people manufacturing traffic jams in a northern New Jersey city as political retribution against its Democratic mayor signaled the end of Christie’s gubernatorial career.</p>
<p>Yet Christie had already sealed his place in regional infamy with his decision to cancel the project that led Amtrak to set up Gateway. ARC had already broken ground when Christie killed it. The project running from North Bergen, New Jersey, to a station in Macy’s Midtown Manhattan department store would have offered relief to New Jersey Transit’s miserable New York–bound commuters. Christie quickly glommed onto ARC’s nickname: “the tunnel to Macy’s basement.”</p>
<p>Like fellow conservative Republican Governors Rick Scott in Florida, John Kasich in Ohio, and Scott Walker in Wisconsin, Christie took great pride in deep-sixing public transit projects. He declared that ARC was headed for cost overruns (a claim later found to be overstated). The state had to pay back a portion of federal funding, but Christie promptly used the state contribution to stave off a gas tax hike and build highway projects like the Pulaski Skyway in northeastern New Jersey, and for other politically motivated ends.</p>
<p>Two years later, Hurricane Sandy pushed the Atlantic Ocean into upper New York Harbor and into the Hudson and East Rivers. Amtrak officials had considered allowing Penn Station to flood but chose the train tunnels instead. Sandy closed down the Northeast Corridor for days, producing mind-numbing traffic jams as train commuters turned to cars and buses. Despite that huge heads-up, Cuomo and Christie continued to spar over paying for the Hudson River crossing projects until 2015, when the Obama administration publicly shamed the two men into a deal: The states would pay 50 percent of the costs and the federal government would fund the remaining half of the program.</p>
<p>Yet the prolonged conflicts and delays over investment in transportation infrastructure operate within the political parties as well as between them. After the ARC debacle, Cuomo did not want to talk about tunnels unless the federal government planned to chip in. For most of his tenure, he had focused like a laser on other New York infrastructure projects, including LaGuardia Airport and Moynihan Station across the street from Penn Station. His signature accomplishment was the $4 billion replacement of the Tappan Zee Bridge (renamed the Mario M. Cuomo Bridge after his late father, a former New York governor, much to local residents’ dismay). The new Hudson River span upriver from New York City connects suburban Rockland and Westchester counties—two critical suburban voting blocs. The sum total of the projects raises the governor’s infrastructure profile, an important consideration for a man whose name has long been in the mix of possible 2020 Democratic presidential contenders.</p>
<p>But the ongoing MTA subway crisis, itself the product of inadequate long-term investment, shredded Cuomo’s getting-big-stuff-done reputation in a New York minute. <span class="pullquote">As subway commuters endured the daily hell of getting around, Cuomo and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio engaged in a war of words</span> over whether the city or the state was responsible for the subway’s dire condition and who should pay up. Yet both men and their predecessors brought on the current crisis by failing to prioritize rail maintenance.</p>
<p>According to a recent <em>New York Times</em> investigation, state transportation officials regularly steered MTA funds to all sorts of people and places, including ski resorts the state manages, and failed to keep or hire the key officials required to run one of the world’s largest subway networks. New York mayors have either reduced funding or declined to provide additional dollars. Plagued with deficits, the authority coped by borrowing, and now spends a good chunk of its budget on debt payments.</p>
<p>More subway mishaps in early 2017 raised the stakes. Transportation advocates redirected New Yorkers’ fury from City Hall to Albany by pointing out that it was the governor, not the mayor, who controls the agency and has the real power to fix the mess.</p>
<p>“Cuomo is not down here riding the trains and the subways,” says Laurie Williams, a Long Island Rail Road commuter who works in the city. “This is a huge thing—it impacts millions of people every day.”</p>
<p>The governor finally declared a state of emergency at the MTA, at roughly the same time that Amtrak, which owns and operates Penn Station, launched its intensive repair program after several derailments. (Paid out of existing funding, the repairs had long been shunted aside by other station projects and scheduling concerns.) The one-two punch prompted Cuomo to catastrophize about a “summer of hell,” which prompted a snide threat from Chris Christie, who wanted to “smack” him for not being “more disciplined.”</p>
<p>The much-feared commuter chaos at Penn Station never quite materialized. But the bad optics of the Cuomo-DeBlasio-Christie crosstalk not only illuminated the travesty that is transit in New York and New Jersey; it distracted from the summer’s fight to fund Gateway. It also exposed the region’s institutional defects that undermine cooperation and turn transportation policy into crisis management rooted in a failure to plan for the future.</p>
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<p><strong>SHORTLY BEFORE PRESIDENT</strong> Obama’s Treasury Department turned out the lights, officials published a hefty report, “40 Proposed U.S. Transportation and Water Infrastructure Projects of Major Economic Significance.” Northeast Corridor rail improvements that included Gateway made the cut. The report identified the four major barriers for completion of the projects: inadequate funding, increasing capital costs, lack of consensus, and regulatory problems. The report singled out Gateway specifically, not for its funding difficulties but for its “lack of consensus among multiple public and private partners.”</p>
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<p>After the ARC debacle, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo did not want to talk about tunnels unless the federal government planned to chip in.</p>
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<p>The Gateway Program Development Corporation, the organization tasked with coordinating the project with the federal government, and its partner agencies, including Amtrak, New Jersey Transit, and the Port Authority, are hurtling into the unknown. Transit has usually gotten short shrift in attention and dollars in a country that prioritizes highways and air travel. Major transportation projects do not advance without a significant federal funding component, and Gateway is no exception.</p>
<p>The local partners have identified their funding contributions for one project, the Portal North Bridge. The New Jersey state transit agency’s roughly $400 million contribution relies on a federal Railroad Rehabilitation and Improvement Financing (RRIF) loan backed by state transportation fund revenues and additional trust fund revenues. The Port Authority also received a $300 million RIFF loan and contributed additional authority net revenues. A pending Federal Transit Administration Capital Investment Grant (CIG) would provide roughly half of the remaining funds. With New Jersey’s Transportation Trust Fund reliant on gas taxes and other monies, and the Port Authority collecting tolls, fees, and rents, among other revenue generators, taxpayers could certainly see price hikes in local taxes, tolls, and other fees. (Amtrak has sent more than $300 million to the project to date; its tunnel contribution has yet to be determined.)</p>
<p>The trouble is that the bridge funds add up to far less than the multi-billions Gateway needs, especially if the federal money falls through. Trump’s first budget eliminated the FTA’s Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grants and CIG funding, which kickstart projects nationwide. (There are two CIG grant applications in progress, one for the bridge and another for the tunnel.) The 2018 House appropriations bill also eliminated funding for TIGER grants, while the Senate version funds them. Both the House and the Senate fund the capital grants, though the Senate proposal provides more money.</p>
<p>Although public-private partnerships could play a role in Gateway, it is highly unlikely that a single private company would take on the megaproject without a sweetener such as tolls—and there are no tolls for the rail bridges and tunnels. One scenario that could prove attractive to a private entity might involve fixed payments made by Amtrak or New Jersey Transit. These “availability payments” could be leveraged against the rail operators’ revenues or their tunnel usage. New York and New Jersey might also make payments that dedicate a fixed amount of state revenues to a private entity. California, Colorado, and Florida have recently used availability payments for major transportation projects.</p>
<p>The complex governance, mercurial political players, and general Washington dysfunction pose barriers that are as difficult to overcome as financing. “In New York, I can’t even imagine anybody thinking that the politics are conducive to any kind of partnership,” says Robert Puentes, president of Eno Center for Transportation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.</p>
<p>Gateway has sought advice from private firms. An August Request for Information attracted nearly 50 American and international firms, which offered suggestions about everything from procurement and design to construction and financing. Some of the firms suggested that certain technical components of the project could be broken up into smaller contracts to minimize private-sector risks, which would make Gateway a more attractive investment prospect. But when firms ask about federal funding, no one can give them an answer.</p>
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<p><strong>Watch This Space: </strong>The entrance to the future Hudson River tunnels. (We could be watching for a long time.)</p>
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<p><strong>THE GATEWAY PROGRAM</strong> is being mowed down in the ideological crossfire. Tepid platitudes from Secretary Chao about the project being “an absolute priority” fail to instill confidence, since the infrastructure package promised by Trump has not materialized. Last June, the Department of Transportation sent another ominous signal by withdrawing from Gateway’s Board of Trustees. In a terse, one-paragraph letter to the board chair, the department noted that it does not sit on the boards of local transportation projects, a pronouncement overlooking other development corporations that involved the department, such as New York’s Moynihan Station and Union Station in Washington, D.C.</p>
<p>“It sends the signal that [the Department of Transportation is] not going to be playing an active role in the project; it’s going to be the local players that are going to be funding and planning this work,” says Richard Barone, RPA’s vice president for transportation, of the department’s decision, adding that the department may only play an oversight and technical assistance support role.</p>
<p>Gateway is the poster child for the types of projects that many Trump administration ideologues want the federal government to exit. When it comes to public transportation, there is a “If you want it, you pay for it” mentality at work in Washington.</p>
<p>The Republican tax reform program complicates cobbling together the funding for Gateway, since it does not support the kind of private-sector infrastructure investments that Republicans have traditionally touted as alternatives to using public-sector money. The tax-exempt private activity bonds, or PABs, that would make Gateway more attractive to private investors are on the chopping block in the House (which may bring other projects across the country to a halt and force a scramble for new financial plans). According to Politico, Democratic Representative Elizabeth Esty of Connecticut told the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus that Chao had assured her the problem “would be fixed in the infrastructure bill—they’re aware that [the elimination of PABs] is a big problem.”</p>
<p>Yet the GOP tax legislation will send the national deficit soaring, all but assuring that Trump Republicans are likely to rediscover their inner deficit hawks when the time comes to talk about infrastructure. <span class="pullquote">The vitality of one of the country’s prime economic engines appears to be of little concern to red-state Republicans who cannot stomach sending billions to the Northeast.</span> After Representative Rodney Frelinghuysen, the New Jersey Republican who chairs the House Appropriations Committee and represents parts of several northern New Jersey counties near Manhattan, managed to steered $900 million to Gateway in the House 2018 fiscal budget, other Republicans like Ted Budd of North Carolina lobbed verbal grenades at the allocation, calling it an earmark.</p>
<p>“How long are urbanists and progressives going to go along with a system of federalism that in reality extracts money from urban areas … and doesn’t return money to those areas for things that really matter to us, and instead widens highways in rural Alabama with tax dollars that are paid in New York and California?” says David Bragdon, executive director of the TransitCenter, a New York City think tank.</p>
<p>The decades-long ordeal to transform the Hudson River crossings into assets worthy of the 21st century is in a precarious place. Amtrak officials warn that the tunnels have less than 20 years (if not much less) left. Catastrophic structural failure or another hurricane could close them again. But a more mundane scenario is likely: Amtrak decides that one tunnel is too hazardous and orders a shutdown. The closure of one tunnel would reduce rail capacity by 75 percent: Instead of 24 trains every hour, there would be six.</p>
<p>“If you lose those tunnels, you don’t get from Boston to Washington anymore on a train without getting off. You’ll get on a local train or take the ferry over to New Jersey. It’s going to be a real pain in the butt and it’s going to add to your travel, or you are not going to do it,” says Barone. But crises like the 2007 Minneapolis bridge collapse and the Flint water debacle have not convinced Congress to speed up on infrastructure.</p>
<p>Constructing a megaproject in a climate of ideologically driven austerity and hostility to paying for transit demands what Plotch of Saint Peter’s University calls an “effective public-sector champion” in Politics Across the Hudson, his book on the Tappan Zee Bridge construction. On Capitol Hill, Schumer and Frelinghuysen have the interest, clout, and tactical skills to fill that role, but they are likely to be outvoted.</p>
<p>Gateway needs other powerful allies to drive home the reality that supporting passenger rail in the Northeast is integral to the regional and national economy. Raising the profile of the project should fall to the governors and members of Congress of the eight northeastern states and the District of Columbia that are under the aegis of the Northeast Corridor Commission, a rail advisory planning body established by Congress nearly a decade ago.</p>
<p>“You need everyone from Congress, from Boston to D.C., to come together to make a series of investments in the Northeast Corridor and … to be pushing and lobbying hard, as a bloc,” says Barone.</p>
<p>A permanent Gateway executive director could lead this effort. But whether that position will command a big enough megaphone will depend on the individual selected. A pick could be announced by the first quarter of 2018. Polling data and the commuter rail and subway crises demonstrate that the riding public can be a powerful pressure group, but neither commuters nor business leaders have yet to be effectively harnessed to support Gateway. And Trump remains disdainful of states that tend to elect Democrats, even at grave public cost.</p>
<p>The United States has arrived at a point in its history where the political norms have eroded so much that Washington continues to undermine a critical project and ignore the economic consequences of failing to improve train travel to and through New York City for millions of people. Gateway is a core transportation modernization project for the country, not a nice-to-have novelty on some over-ambitious wish list. It urgently requires an infusion of capital, since there are no alternatives and no cheap fixes. The main obstacle is not tunneling under the Hudson. It’s getting the right people in the room to make the big bucks happen.</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 22 Jan 2018 09:34:26 +0000229351 at http://prospect.orgGabrielle GurleyAmazon, City Killer?http://prospect.org/article/amazon-city-killer
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<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>rying to figure out where Amazon will set down roots or, depending on your perspective, spread its tentacles, is the newest capitalistic cage match. Nineteen American cities and one Canadian metro area, down from the original 238, now go into overdrive to secure what promises to one of the most transformative economic decisions in the world: a single $5 billion investment in a second headquarters that brings 50,000 high-tech workers and their families, plus thousands more jobs in associated sectors.</p>
<p>This competition spurred the type of collaboration between private sector and political leaders that only develops when a trophy like an Amazon comes into view, according to Susan Wachter, a University of Pennsylvania Wharton School professor of real estate and finance and co-director of Penn Institute for Urban Research, which assembled a group of urban experts to <a href="http://penniur.upenn.edu/publications/the-5-billion-question-will-cities-win-or-lose-in-the-bid-for-amazon">weigh in</a> on the Amazon competition.</p>
<p>In a conversation with <em>The American Prospect</em>, Wachter uses the word “transformative” often to illustrate what the next Amazon outpost can expect—for better and worse. Certainly, becoming Amazon’s HQ2 would come with a long list of bragging rights, beginning with a straight shot to world-class status (except for finalists New York, Los Angeles, and perhaps Washington, that already hold that distinction) for the winner. Amazon may even offer or stimulate major investments in education, infrastructure, and arts and culture.</p>
<p>But one critical question gets glossed over in headquarters horse race: why would state and local political and civic leaders participate in an economic development free-for-all that is guaranteed to lead to the Seattlefication of their metropolitan area?</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p dir="ltr" lang="en" xml:lang="en">In Seattle, Amazon pays the people working in its warehouses $3/hr less than average for the region. <a href="https://t.co/3PZnB8uciy">https://t.co/3PZnB8uciy</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/inequality?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#inequality</a> <a href="https://t.co/F4qSk5DQqW">pic.twitter.com/F4qSk5DQqW</a></p>
<p>— ILSR (@ilsr) <a href="https://twitter.com/ilsr/status/829755602075283456?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 9, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p>Amazon has turned Seattle, its current headquarters, into a 21st-century exemplar of income inequality. Living in the Pacific Northwest’s largest city is a beautiful thing for a worker with the skill set to slip effortlessly into a high-tech job. For everyone else, Seattle now features all the disturbing traits of any place that rewards knowledge workers at the top of the food chain and flushes away just about everyone else: from astronomical housing costs that have long since displaced middle- and lower- income people to punishing commutes for everyone who has to move in and out of the city.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p dir="ltr" lang="en" xml:lang="en">Ultimate weirdness of <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Seattle?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Seattle</a> income inequality: families living in homeless shelter owned by <a href="https://twitter.com/amazon?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@amazon</a> - meet them <a href="https://t.co/ucbeYfvXuT">https://t.co/ucbeYfvXuT</a></p>
<p>— Joy Portella (@joyportella) <a href="https://twitter.com/joyportella/status/727959600373202945?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 4, 2016</a></p></blockquote>
<p>Amazon’s arrival is bound to accelerate the displacement of people of more modest means and send the cost of living in the “lucky” victor soaring. The New York and Washington metro areas, already two of most expensive places to live in the United States, would become even more unaffordable for the average worker. (There are actually 15 “cities,” not 20, competing. New York and Newark constitute one mega-city; while Washington, D.C., Montgomery County, Maryland, and Northern Virginia are effectively another single metropolitan area—whether local leaders like it or not.)</p>
<p>Wachter notes that the inclusion of Washington on the short list is especially puzzling, since the city “is on the cusp of being totally unaffordable and congested.” She added that Amazon could have another longer-term goal when it comes to the District. “In most of the rest of the world the major city of the country is the capital; this [move] would do that [for Washington],” she says. Though New York, with its preeminent financial, media, and arts and culture communities, isn’t likely to slip into second place any time soon. (Self-interest could also be at work: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, a married father of four, who also owns <em>The Washington Post,</em> is already renovating a mansion—a former museum—in Washington’s exclusive Kalorama neighborhood.)</p>
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<p>The scale of the Amazon competition and the lengths that some cities and towns were willing to go to influence the company turned into an economic development decision into <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/19/16504042/amazon-hq2-second-headquarters-most-funny-crazy-pitches-proposals-stonecrest-new-york">reality-show spectacle</a>, featuring a plethora of tax incentives. New Jersey lawmakers plan to offer as much as <a href="http://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/2018/01/nj_legislature_clears_way_for_5b_in_amazon_tax_bre.html'">$5 billion in tax breaks</a>. That’s a dubious use for public funds. The tax revenues that a $600 billion company like Amazon could generate would accomplish more if invested in public services: local schools, housing, and New Jersey Transit, the much-castigated state wide public transportation system. (Only Toronto offered zero tax dollars.) Besides, Amazon needs taxpayer dollars for a new headquarters as much as an owner of a professional sport team needs tax incentives to build a new stadium.</p>
<p>Timothy J. Bartik, a Penn IUR fellow and a W.E. Upjohn Institute senior economist offered this sobering take on tax-incentive arms race: “If the winning city provided large long-term tax incentives, this may be interpreted by many local policymakers as a rationale for escalating incentive offers to other businesses.” He added, “This may divert resources away from educational investments that may be more cost-effective in promoting local economic development. … But such incentives are often not the most cost-effective way of creating local jobs.”</p>
<p>Tax breaks can also come back to <a href="http://www.bostonherald.com/business/business_markets/2018/01/bad_news_builds_at_ge">haunt a city</a>. Boston and the state of Massachusetts offered millions in <a href="http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/massachusetts-gave-ge-mega-deal-move-did-it-matter">tax incentives</a> and other benefits (including “concierge services” like customized employee training) in its successful bid to secure General Electric’s corporate headquarters, only to discover this week that the company may be on the verge of breaking up into smaller entities. GE is already cutting back its Boston-based workforce, although the company claims that it still intends to bring nearly 1,000 jobs to the city.</p>
<p>There is an additional challenge for contenders like Chicago, Newark, and Philadelphia, with their high concentrations of poverty. Those cities must address what Wachter calls the “challenge of inclusivity.” “If Amazon chooses one of these cities, [that decision] should be accompanied by] a transformation initiative so that the move is not just a move to bring in high priced talent, but a move to grow the talent in that city,” she says.</p>
<p>In this new Gilded Age, cities can aspire to improve the lives of its citizens, courtesy of multibillion-dollar companies like Amazon. Perhaps the winning city and Amazon will join forces to fund education programs and repair and build schools, buy new buses or rail cars, incentivize workforce housing development, or back rent control initiatives. Maybe Amazon will take its corporate responsibilities seriously, realize that public funds should go to public purposes, not into company coffers, and decline tax incentives.</p>
<p>Or maybe Toronto gets the nod.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p dir="ltr" lang="en" xml:lang="en">Critical to remember that the Toronto Amazon HQ2 bid did not offer subsidies as a way to get at the table. Our proposal touted our quality of life, openness to immigration and current/forthcoming transit investments as the key reasons to come. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/WeDidItRight?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#WeDidItRight</a></p>
<p>— jennifer keesmaat (@jen_keesmaat) <a href="https://twitter.com/jen_keesmaat/status/954004170884890624?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 18, 2018</a></p></blockquote>
<p>The finalists are:</p>
<p>· Atlanta</p>
<p>· Austin</p>
<p>· Boston</p>
<p>· Chicago</p>
<p>· Columbus, Ohio</p>
<p>· Dallas</p>
<p>· Denver</p>
<p>· Indianapolis</p>
<p>· Los Angeles</p>
<p>· Miami</p>
<p>· Montgomery County, Maryland</p>
<p>· Nashville</p>
<p>· Newark, New Jersey</p>
<p>· New York City</p>
<p>· Northern Virginia</p>
<p>· Philadelphia</p>
<p>· Pittsburgh</p>
<p>· Raleigh</p>
<p>· Toronto</p>
<p>· Washington, D.C. </p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 19 Jan 2018 19:28:09 +0000229354 at http://prospect.orgGabrielle GurleyWhat Cities Can Learn from Houston Metro’s Hurricane Harvey Experiencehttp://prospect.org/article/what-cities-can-learn-houston-metros-hurricane-harvey-experience
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<p><span class="dropcap">I</span>n early December, two groups of researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the World Weather Attribution, a global network of scientists, independently <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/13/climate/hurricane-harvey-climate-change.html">concluded</a> that climate change made Hurricane Harvey’s record-setting torrents far more damaging. Hurricanes usually weaken and sputter out after making landfall, but Harvey sat and spun, drenching the metro region with nearly 50 inches of rain over <a href="http://www.chron.com/news/houston-weather/hurricaneharvey/article/Hurricane-Harvey-timeline-12169265.php#photo-14017683">five days</a>. The storm surge that pushed against the coastline slowed the outflows from rivers already swollen by rainfall farther inland, contributing to major flooding. </p>
<p>Climate change finds public transit agencies hard-pressed to confront and adapt to extreme meteorological events. Most transit systems have long-established emergency procedures to handle hazards like hurricanes, blizzards, or major accidents. But small and large systems alike are woefully unprepared for increases in the severity or frequency of storms. The performance of the Houston public transit system, the Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County, known as Metro, during Harvey demonstrates that public transit systems can take steps in the aftermath of storms to address vulnerabilities and design longer-term strategies to address future weather events.</p>
<p>The Federal Transit Administration’s 2013 Gulf Coast Climate Change Adaptation Pilot Study <a href="https://www.transit.dot.gov/sites/fta.dot.gov/files/FTA_Report_No._0072.pdf">analyzed</a> the challenges facing Houston, Galveston, and Tampa, and how the experiences of those cities could inform how other transit agencies handle the growing environmental crisis. The region “experiences the impacts of tropical storms and hurricanes more than any other area of the United States,” according to the report. The study also noted that the Gulf Coast faces not only increasing hurricane and tropical storm intensity and sea-level rise, but also increasing temperatures, and precipitation extremes from extreme rainfall to drought.</p>
<p>Metro has robust mitigation, preparation, response, and recovery strategies. (About four million people live in the Metro service area.) How does Metro do it? To begin, it coordinates its emergency response through Houston TransStar, a partnership of the city of Houston, Harris County, and state of Texas. The organization manages the area transportation system and coordinates responses to storms and other emergencies. Metro has extensive checklists of responsibilities during weather events, including securing its vehicles; assuring that essential Metro employees are on duty, provisioned for, and available to respond as events warrant; and coordinating communications with emergency managers, first responders, riders, and the news media.</p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">Although Harvey broke records, two earlier rainstorms hit Houston especially hard, with each deluge more breathtaking than the preceding one.</span> The <a href="http://www.chron.com/news/houston-weather/article/Remembering-the-Memorial-Day-Flood-one-America-s-11176375.php">2015 Memorial Day Flood</a> (in less than 12 hours, one foot of rain fell, sparking flash floods) and the <a href="http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/tax-day-flood/article/Revisiting-Houston-s-Tax-Day-Floods-one-year-later-11077890.php">2016 Tax Day Flood</a> (thunderstorms stalled over the city, producing 17 inches of rain) prompted Metro officials to consider how to handle high water and protect buses, paratransit vehicles, and light-rail lines.</p>
<p>Those storms persuaded the transit system to add military vehicles to its fleet, which, unlike conventional buses, can navigate high water. Metro bought three Humvees and four 5-ton trucks for roughly $35,000 through the Federal Surplus Property Program. During Harvey, transit officials worked with emergency managers and first responders to decide where to deploy the vehicles.</p>
<p>“One of the things [Metro] can do is bring people out of harm’s way, out of high water, back to buses,” says Houston Metro President Tom Lambert. “Then buses [can] take them where they need to go.” Metro <a href="http://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/Patman-Harvey-proves-robust-public-transit-needed-12192711.php">transported</a> about 10,000 people to emergency shelters and helped move Red Cross supplies. The agency plans to purchase two additional Humvees and two more trucks through the surplus program.</p>
<p>Metro made other fleet decisions on the fly during the storm, making good use of its relationships with neighboring transit systems. Harris County Transit, which serves areas east of Houston, provided Metro with school buses—which actually can drive through high water, according to Lambert. With school bus drivers largely unavailable, Metro deployed its own drivers to ferry people out of flooded neighborhoods to emergency management command posts and then to shelters. “That’s never been done before in this region,” says Lambert. </p>
<p>Metro also took precautions to protect its buses from flood waters. Officials stationed 120 buses on an overpass to avoid the flood waters that eventually inundated a low-lying depot. Of the system’s roughly 1,230 buses, only two were completely damaged in the storm; another 12 sustained minor damage. The light-rail system operated until rising waters forced its closure. There was no structural damage to the rail system and only minimal flooding damage to power facilities and a parking installation. Metro officials may consider moving one power facility to higher ground. Overall, Metro sustained about $15 million in damages, according to Lambert. (The system’s 2017 operating budget was nearly $570 million.) </p>
<p>“Being very rigorous in identifying your vulnerabilities is important,” says Jon Brooks, an assistant research scientist at Texas A&amp;M’s Transportation Institute, and one of the authors of the federal Gulf Coast transit study. “Some transit operations will have their fleet centered at one facility because they are rather small and that works for them,” he says. “Others in large regions will have multiple operations centers and should make sure that they are constructed and hardened against anticipated events.”</p>
<p>Metro knew which lines it wanted to get up and running first after the storm ended, and had pre-existing agreements for services like tree removal, so that the agency did not compete with other organizations to secure contractors after a major storm. Except for a few detours in the western sections of the city, the system was mostly up and running after Labor Day, a little more than a week after the hurricane. Metro captured about 80 percent of its ridership on bus routes north and south of the most severely flooded areas. <strong>“</strong>You may not be able to serve 100 percent of the ridership but you can maximize [that by] adjusting the service plan and communicate that to get as many people riding on the system as you can,” says Lambert.</p>
<p>The system received high praise for keeping the public well-informed about real-time developments during Harvey and the subsequent flooding, particularly on social media. Metro was “as prepared as they could be for a pretty bad hurricane,” says Andrea French, executive director of Transportation Advisory Group Houston.</p>
<p>Why did Metro perform so well during Harvey? Like many public agencies, Metro adopted an “all hazards” approach to emergencies and disasters, preparing, training, and adapting to risks (particularly recurring events) ranging from hurricanes to terrorist attacks. Lambert is especially keen on the value of good professional relationships. During a disaster, he stresses that ties with other transit agencies, first responders, and other local, state, and federal emergency managers are key. Long before a storm hits or a fire burns out of control, transit officials should be actively involved in city, state, and regional emergency management planning efforts, he says, and employees must understand the plans and get trained to work with regional teams that respond to emergencies.</p>
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<p>Yet Brooks notes that while major urban transit agencies like Metro have extensive emergency preparations, there are far more smaller agencies, with fewer management employees to take the lead during an emergency. (Most transit agency employees, of course, are drivers.) Larger agencies in a given region should consider having experienced managers provide relief and other assistance to their counterparts in smaller systems. There needs to be a way to “formalize volunteer assistance to peer agencies to prepare for that,” he says.</p>
<p>Across the country, voters have been eagerly demonstrating their willingness to raise taxes to provide more public transportation options. Whether the Harvey experience will translate into more focused attention and more funding to meet Houston’s public transportation demands is an unknown. “A lot of Texans love their cars,” says French, who notes that the political landscape is “very road-centric” outside the 610 loop, the inner beltway that encircles downtown Houston. Inside that beltway, residents want more public transit.</p>
<p>Houstonians’ perspectives on public transportation may shift dramatically after Harvey, however, if an individual or a family lost a vehicle due to flooding. <span class="pullquote-right">The storm <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/harvey-houston-cars-ruined/">obliterated</a> about one million cars. </span>Carrin Patman, the chair of Metro’s board of directors, called Metro <a href="http://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/Patman-Harvey-proves-robust-public-transit-needed-12192711.php">“a lifeline”</a> for those residents in a September 2017 <em>Houston Chronicle</em> editorial. She also noted that the region’s population will increase to about ten million people in 20 years.</p>
<p>Harvey sparked a “huge need and push for transit,” French says. “Some could go out and buy a new car,” she adds. “But many could not.”</p>
<p>Metro continues to collect public input on a new regional transit plan. When that process ends, Metro’s board will decide which elements to include in the plan and likely design a bond referendum to reflect those needs. A measure which could go before voters in November may provide some clues about future transit priorities in post-Harvey Houston. “That will be the report card, so to speak, about what Harvey did not or did not do to influence people’s opinions about public transportation,” French says.</p>
<p>There is one certainty, however: As metropolitan Houston keeps on growing, those residents can expect more severe storms, flooding, and other extreme weather.</p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 12 Jan 2018 20:40:30 +0000229310 at http://prospect.orgGabrielle GurleyBoston’s Amazon HQ2 Fantasies Take Offhttp://prospect.org/blog/tapped/boston%E2%80%99s-amazon-hq2-fantasies-take
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Who needs one million square feet of office space in Boston’s Seaport District? Amazon might. <em>The Boston Globe</em> <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2018/01/10/amazon-seeks-big-new-office-space-city/kMktDIWuDCg8ibG4Accc9H/story.html">reported</a> Thursday that real-estate industry executives “with knowledge of the talks” dished that Amazon is in the market for one, maybe two office buildings in the bustling and picturesque waterfront neighborhood. (The <em>Boston Business Journal</em> <a href="Hub%20(Boston’s%20nickname,%20short%20for%20">first</a> reported the story Tuesday.)</p>
<p>This latest revelation has set tongues wagging that “the Hub” (a Boston nickname, short for “Hub of the Universe”—yes, seriously) had moved to the front of the pack of more than 200 U.S. cities looking to land “HQ2,” Amazon’s much-discussed second headquarters—even though Amazon had already been in the hunt for more office space (the company has about 1,000 employees in metro Boston) long before company officials announced the new headquarters search.</p>
<p>Predictably, Amazon had nothing to say to the <em>Globe.</em> The company plans to make a decision on an additional Boston site at about the same time that it announces its short list of finalists for its new headquarters. The much-vaunted new HQ would employ about 50,000 people.</p>
<p>Massachusetts officials are salivating over the possibility of adding Amazon to its roster of corporate catches. General Electric has already decided to move its headquarters from Fairfield, Connecticut, to Boston.</p>
<p>City officials have also proposed another location, a former race track in an eastern section of the city. The race track would be better able to provde the 8 million square feet that the company says it needs for a new campus. But emails obtained by the Associated Press <a href="https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2018/01/11/documents-offer-glimpse-of-states-push-to-woo-amazon">indicate</a> that state officials are trying to “pitch the whole state” as a potential site.</p>
<p>A whole-state strategy might be a more attractive option. Massachusetts prides itself on its highly educated workforce and its standing as home to dozens of other technology innovators.</p>
<p>That pitch has the virtue of glossing over some Boston negatives. The Seaport <a href="http://prospect.org/article/bostons-rendezvous-climate-destiny">flooded</a> in jaw-dropping fashion during a recent nor’easter. (Also known locally as the “Innovation District,” some locals refer to the area as the “Inundation District.”) Area residents fear that an HQ2 victory would drive up the metro region’s already astronomical housing prices and saddle new workers with a notoriously poor transportation system:</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p dir="ltr" lang="en" xml:lang="en">I hear this a lot—people driven away from living/staying in Boston because the <a href="https://twitter.com/MBTA?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@mbta</a> is so unreliable. And <a href="https://twitter.com/marty_walsh?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@marty_walsh</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/MassGovernor?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@MassGovernor</a> think they can make <a href="https://twitter.com/amazon?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@Amazon</a> want to come here?!? Big part of why Boston can’t retain all the talent that comes here for college. <a href="https://t.co/iI2PwdUEQ5">https://t.co/iI2PwdUEQ5</a></p>
<p>— FixTheMBTAnow (@FixTheMBTAnow) <a href="https://twitter.com/FixTheMBTAnow/status/951081800822087680?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 10, 2018</a></p></blockquote>
<script async="" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></div></div></div>Thu, 11 Jan 2018 21:53:53 +0000229301 at http://prospect.orgGabrielle GurleyBoston’s Rendezvous with Climate Destinyhttp://prospect.org/article/bostons-rendezvous-climate-destiny
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<p>A Boston firefighter wades through flood waters from Boston Harbor on January 4, 2018.</p>
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<p><span class="dropcap">W</span>hen Hurricane Harvey hit Houston last August, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh expressed his fear that his own city would have been “wiped out” by a comparable deluge. Scores of people would be rendered homeless, waterfront areas would be ravaged, the damage would run into the multi-billions. Several years earlier, the city dodged a bullet during Hurricane Sandy: Boston was spared the flooding that paralyzed Manhattan only because the storm hit Boston hours after high tide.</p>
<p>If Bostonians were apprehensive after Harvey, they are even more nervous after the first blizzard of 2018. Residents were jolted out of complacency as climate change–fueled sea-level rise, cyclonic winds, and high tides produced a storm surge that sent the Atlantic Ocean flowing into Boston’s coastal neighborhoods.</p>
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p dir="ltr" lang="en" xml:lang="en">Look at this video outside our window of flooding in <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Boston?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Boston</a> historic <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/FortPoint?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#FortPoint</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Seaport?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Seaport</a> neighborhood that is causing big dumpsters to float down the street. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/blizzard2018?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#blizzard2018</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/CNN?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@CNN</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/WCVB?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@WCVB</a> <a href="https://t.co/mjfrZJYnKr">pic.twitter.com/mjfrZJYnKr</a></p>
<p>— kelkelly (@kelkelly) <a href="https://twitter.com/kelkelly/status/948982158533824512?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 4, 2018</a></p></blockquote>
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<p>Houston, a city with no zoning laws, has long paved over bayous and other waterways that might have ameliorated Harvey’s devastating rainfall. If anything, Boston is at the other end of the zoning spectrum, with volumes of notoriously complex regulations that have spun off a cottage industry in development and building workarounds that the average person scarcely knows about.</p>
<p>But as with many threats, people need a real warning before they give serious attention to a problem. “What if” scenarios premised on more-frequent Atlantic storms and sea-level rise have been debated—and steamrolled over by the next news cycle in Boston—for years.</p>
<p>Now that the wake-up call has come, city leaders must take reams of climate change analysis and zoning reform aspirations and mold them to keep pace with rapid commercial and residential development in the urban coastal areas that are at greatest risk for flooding in the coming decades.</p>
<p>The threat is well-documented. The 2014 National Climate Assessment <a href="https://nca2014.globalchange.gov/report/regions/northeast.">warned</a> that the Northeast has experienced a 1-foot increase in sea level since 1900, well over the global average of roughly 8 inches. Massachusetts has some of the <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/02/25/sea-level-rise-here-was-quicker-century-than-elsewhere-and-that-bodes-ill-for-future/t7XOCWqGsnW1kPKH84W5BJ/story.html">fastest-rising sea levels</a> in the United States, and Boston could see as much as 8 inches of sea-level rise by 2030, according to the city’s Climate Ready Boston <a href="https://www.boston.gov/sites/default/files/02_20161206_executivesummary_digital.pdf">report.</a></p>
<p>Some developers have responded to the threat of increases in hurricanes, nor’easters, and “king tides” (the highest yearly tides), placing the most vulnerable assets like electrical and IT systems on higher floors in new buildings. Yet there are those who behave as if the Atlantic Ocean is a benign entity that will continue to gently lap at the shoreline, while developers continue to command premium prices for water views. This hubris has produced Boston’s newest neighborhood, the Seaport District, a Boston Harbor commercial and residential district that arose on what had been a blighted zone of shipping installations and warehouses. It lies mostly in a flood zone.</p>
<p>Areas of the Seaport District, along with a few other coastal Boston neighborhoods, flooded on Thursday, producing some of the most dramatic images of the blizzard. The storm <a href="%3cblockquote%20class=%22twitter-tweet%22%20data-lang=%22en%22%3e%3cp%20lang=%22en%22%20dir=%22ltr%22%3eThe%20firefighters%20carry%20cones%20in%20handy%20bringing%20the%20driver%20to%20safety.%20Please%20avoid%20these%20dangerously%20high%20waters.%20%3ca%20href=%22https:/t.co/NZj9nPFgn4%22%3epic.twitter.com/NZj9nPFgn4%3c">produced</a> the highest tide ever <a href="https://twitter.com/NWSBoston/status/949313785671667712">recorded</a> since 1921, breaking the record set by the Blizzard of 1978.</p>
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p dir="ltr" lang="en" xml:lang="en">The firefighters carry cones in handy bringing the driver to safety. Please avoid these dangerously high waters. <a href="https://t.co/NZj9nPFgn4">pic.twitter.com/NZj9nPFgn4</a></p>
<p>— Boston Fire Dept. (@BostonFire) <a href="https://twitter.com/BostonFire/status/948986920985612288?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 4, 2018</a></p></blockquote>
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<p>The Seaport is one of the city’s most desirable enclaves, featuring Boston’s largest convention center, hotels, and popular contemporary art and children’s museums. Trendy restaurants and new condos and apartments have sprung up over the past decade. The hospitality and real-estate sectors are not the only industries seduced by the siren call of the Seaport. It is also the site of the new General Electric headquarters—a site affected by the same waters that carried off Dumpsters from nearby streets. (To address sea-level rise, GE plans to raise the initial levels of the building above grade. But as the flooding demonstrated, the surrounding streets and access points would be largely inaccessible during extreme weather.)</p>
<p>In 2016, <em>Boston</em> magazine reported that the GE site was “close to the highest flooding risk of any habitable city land.” Asked about the location, Western Carolina University’s Robert Young, a coastal geologist, <a href="http://www.bostonmagazine.com/author/mdamiano/">told</a> the magazine:</p>
<blockquote><p>That certainly looks like a crazy place. We dumb-ass, redneck southerners always expect you Yankees to be more environmentally progressive, to integrate more science-based policy in your planning than we do down here. It’s always disappointing to me when that turns out not to really be true.</p>
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<p>Boston has recently updated its climate change policies for large developments, requiring builders to demonstrate that they have taken steps to “determine and avoid, mitigate or eliminate any project impacts due to climate change.” But severe weather events will occur more frequently—with corresponding economic losses.</p>
<p>From 2030 to 2050, the city could see <a href="https://www.boston.gov/sites/default/files/20161207_climate_ready_boston_digital2.pdf">$135 million</a> in annualized loses; by the end of the century such losses could top $1 billion. “If anyone wants to question global warming, just see where the flood zones are,” Mayor Walsh told the <em>Boston Globe</em> this week. “Some of those zones did not flood 30 years ago. I think it reminds developers as they think about development, how do they build into that development potential protections?”</p>
<p>Boston, like Houston, has to confront a reality that no one really wants to face: Yes, these areas can be developed, but we don’t know whether they can be hardened to withstand more frequent, severe weather.</p>
<p>Four days into the new year, Boston has already seen historic flooding in an area that is key to the city’s economic future. City and state officials promote areas like the Seaport as places to do business—and major companies like GE settle right in. How will mayors and business leaders balance growth against the harsh realities of a fast-changing climate? The Boston experience suggests that they still have much to learn.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p dir="ltr" lang="en" xml:lang="en">Friday's page 1 <a href="https://t.co/DhryfcZO7Q">pic.twitter.com/DhryfcZO7Q</a></p>
<p>— Boston Herald (@bostonherald) <a href="https://twitter.com/bostonherald/status/949114477189922816?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 5, 2018</a></p></blockquote>
<script async="" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></div></div></div>Fri, 05 Jan 2018 21:14:02 +0000229259 at http://prospect.orgGabrielle GurleyBlack Alabamians Voted For Themselveshttp://prospect.org/article/black-alabamians-voted-themselves
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<p>Doug Jones supporters celebrate his victory over Roy Moore at the Sheraton in Birmingham, Alabama</p>
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<p><span class="dropcap">W</span>hat motivated African American men and women to vote on Tuesday in Alabama was not the Democratic Party’s plight or the fate of the republic. It wasn’t Cory Booker or Deval Patrick, or Charles Barkley. It was less about Donald Trump. Doug Jones’s role in bringing two Klansmen to justice, convicting them decades after they killed four little girls at a Birmingham house of worship gave him the credibility among black voters that a generic, good-government Democrat would not have had. But it was Roy Moore and his slavery good-times minstrel <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/08/politics/roy-moore-slavery/index.html'">show</a> that propelled black people to the polls.</p>
<p>There were other tangible reasons to make the share of black votes actually <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/13/us/doug-jones-alabama-black-voters.html">higher</a> than when Barack Obama was on the ballot in 2008 and 2012. On most election days, Americans go to the polls, cast their ballots, bid the poll workers bye-bye, and maybe grab a cookie if there’s a bake sale in the vicinity. In black Alabama, just wanting to vote, getting around the voting obstacles erected by whites, and then traveling to a polling station, are entirely different experiences.</p>
<p>As <em>New York Times Magazine</em> reporter Nikole Hannah Jones observed:</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p dir="ltr" lang="en" xml:lang="en">Only Mississippi can claim to have fought the voting rights of black people as violently and brutally as Alabama. That black voters delivered this victory is the worst nightmare of those who nearly beat <a href="https://twitter.com/repjohnlewis?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@repjohnlewis</a> to death in Selma. Amazing.</p>
<p>— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) <a href="https://twitter.com/nhannahjones/status/940793130533703680?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 13, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<script async="" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><p>In his 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” written a few months before the church bombing, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. noted that, “Throughout Alabama all sorts of devious methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters.” In 2017, gone are the detailed application forms, literacy tests, and <a href="http://www.crmvet.org/info/alvrhow.htm">“voucher” system</a>. Today the devious methods of yesteryear have gone high-tech: computer-assisted gerrymandering, photo ID requirements, and closing down motor vehicle registration offices in mostly black areas (an intent not lost on anyone in Alabama) where people could register to vote and get their photo ID.</p>
<p>Lest Americans forget, Alabama is also one of a handful of states where voting regulations are no longer subject to preclearance by the Justice Department or a federal court. Since the Supreme Court struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, white Alabamians no longer have to justify their injustices to a motley crew of Washington bureaucrats.</p>
<p>Stack up those barriers, and black Alabama still turned out in historic numbers—and showed Democrats what a real Get-Out-The-Vote effort looks like.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p dir="ltr" lang="en" xml:lang="en">1.Just spoke with a source in the Mobile (AL) County NAACP. Here are some things that are happening today on the ground in Alabama that did not happen in the 2016 election. Thread:</p>
<p>— Al Giordano (@AlGiordano) <a href="https://twitter.com/AlGiordano/status/940657094050615297?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 12, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<script async="" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><p>If the Alabama NAACP isn’t energized, no one is. According to journalist Al Giordano, every local NAACP branch worked to call everyone who didn’t vote in 2016. Paid canvassers went out and billboards went up in the right places. Pastors made more effective use of church events. Other black voter mobilization groups combed the state.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the Democratic National Committee took a page out of its Virginia playbook, spending more money in the field and on GOTV efforts than they did on television advertising. The Jones campaign also stepped up to fund GOTV activities sponsored by the Alabama Democratic Conference, the powerful statewide black Democratic network, led by Dr. Joe Reed, who <em>The Intercept</em> <a href="https://theintercept.com/2017/12/12/roy-moore-doug-jones-black-voters/">called</a> the “last true black party boss in the South.”</p>
<p>“Teach Me How to Dougie” may be a new <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/12/13/doug-jones-victory-speech-ends-teach-me-how-dougie/947446001/">theme song</a> for some after Alabama, but the Democratic Party is still a long way from controlling the White House or Congress. Former NBA star and Alabama native Charles Barkley, who once considered running for Alabama governor, had this real-world advice for over-confident Democrats: “This is more of a referendum on Alabama. … It's time for [Democrats] to get off their ass and start making life better for black folks and people who are poor,” Barkley <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2017/12/12/charles_barkley_jones_victory_a_wake_up_call_for_dems_to_get_off_their_ass_stop_abusing_black_vote.html">said</a> after the Jones victory. <span class="pullquote-right">“They've always had our votes. … But this is a wake-up call for Democrats to do better for black people and poor white people.”</span></p>
<p>Black Alabamians know the sting of representation without results. Several days before the election, an AL.com reporter <a href="http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2017/12/un_poverty_official_touring_al.html">accompanied</a> United Nations official Philip Alston, a white Australian, on a trip through Alabama’s Black Belt—because if you want to study Third World-level poverty in the First World, the United States is a good place to start. In Lowndes County, Alston saw homes surrounded by pools of raw sewage. The residents could not afford septic system repairs or upgrades. In one area of Butler County, trenches carry sewage to a stream. “A lot of people aren't being represented even though they're voting,” said one Lowndes County resident.</p>
<p>To stop a white man who pined for slavery from representing Alabama in Washington and to the world, black voters knocked themselves out to get out the vote. But Jones will find he’ll have a tough time. Convicting Klansmen in Alabama is hard. Dealing with Senate Republicans who refuse to negotiate with Democrats and ignore poor black and whites in Alabama and elsewhere may be harder. </p>
<p>The test for Doug Jones is not his commitment to civil rights. Whether black voters will do it all again in 2020 for Jones should he run for re-election (and potential opponents are <a href="http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2017/12/alabama_senate_race_who_could.html">already lining up</a>) depends on how he and his fellow Democrats bridge the race and class divisions that find poor black people in a wealthy, hi-tech superpower living next to cesspools straight out of the Middle Ages.</p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 15 Dec 2017 14:54:14 +0000229100 at http://prospect.orgGabrielle GurleyHow Maine’s Medicaid Expansion Campaign Got to Yeshttp://prospect.org/article/how-maine%E2%80%99s-medicaid-expansion-campaign-got-yes
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<p>Activist Susan Johnston helps coordinate the Election Day canvassing effort at the Mainers for Health Care headquarters in Portland</p>
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<p><span class="dropcap">I</span>magine that expanding Medicaid coverage to tens of thousands of people somehow meant that hunting and fishing licenses would be more expensive. Fearing a price hike, hunters and fishermen would surely surge to the polls in off-year election to vote no on a Medicaid expansion ballot question. Which is why one of the ads unleashed by opponents of Maine’s Medicaid expansion voter initiative made that very—and very ridiculous—claim.</p>
<p>Maine’s Republican Governor, Paul LePage, pugnacious as usual, was the face of the anti-expansion campaign. He took to Maine’s influential talk radio programs to dial up his base, backed by a PAC called Welfare to Work launched by one of his former advisors in August to fight the Medicaid measure. The message? “Able-bodied people” looking “medical welfare” should get off their collective butts and get to work.</p>
<p>Those scare tactics backfired.</p>
<p>Mainers voted 59 percent to 41 percent to expand Medicaid, making Maine the first state to approve Medicaid expansion at the ballot box. Both the turnout and the margin of victory were higher than expected in a year with no candidate elections and just four voter initiatives on ballots statewide.</p>
<p>How do you successfully counter misinformation on an issue as critical as health care? Mainers for Health Care, the statewide coalition that helped lead the successful yes campaign, countered the hunting and fishing license price hikes and other tall tales by relentlessly repeating a few salient data points. Medicaid expansion would create 6,000 new jobs and give the state a $500 million infusion of federal funding each year. Most importantly, the measure would provide health care to 70,000 Mainers.</p>
<p>To get out the vote, canvassers hit the road and knocked on more than 200,000 doors. But according to Mainers for Health Care’s David Farmer, the decisive factor was the coalition’s decision to deploy a “leadership team” of people who would be newly eligible for Medicaid if the measure passed. The team included people like Donna Wall, a Lewiston woman who is the full-time caregiver for her three disabled adult children. She earns just $7,000 a year from a newspaper route and sells her <a href="http://www.redcrossblood.org/learn-about-blood/blood-components/plasma">plasma</a> to have enough money to take her kids to McDonald’s. After her two sons aged out of the program, leaving her as an “able-bodied adult,” she lost Medicaid coverage. </p>
<p>Wall was one of a number of such Maine residents who told powerful stories at town halls and were featured in ad campaigns and newspaper articles. “That cuts through the bullshit of hunting and fishing licenses,” says Farmer, the coalition’s spokesman. “For all the benefits you’ll have for the economy and for hospitals, there are faces and families behind those numbers.”</p>
<p>The ballot initiative expands Medicaid to people who earn 138 percent of the federal poverty level in Maine, $16,643 for a single individual and $22,412 for a family of two. Before the measure passed, 20 percent of Mainers were already on Medicaid; the rate jumps to nearly 30 percent in four rural Maine counties. Hospitals, especially in rural areas, continue to bear the brunt of providing uncompensated medical care to tens of thousands of uninsured people. In 2016, many of the state’s hospitals <a href="http://www.themha.org/Media/Press-Release/MHA-Board-votes-to-support-Medicaid-Expansion-Refehttp://www.themha.org/Media/Press-Release/MHA-Board-votes-to-support-Medicaid-Expansion-Refe">were in financial distress</a>.</p>
<p>The results generally played out along Maine’s urban-rural divide. The initiative did well in cities like Portland, Lewiston, and Bangor and less so in rural areas. But there were notable exceptions. Voters in five rural Republican districts <a href="https://freepressonline.com/Content/Home/Homepage-Rotator/Article/Mainers-Approve-Medicaid-Expansion-in-a-Landslide/78/720/55729">voted to expand Medicaid</a> even though their state representatives remained vocal opponents of expansion. In some towns, the no vote prevailed narrowly.</p>
<p>Health care has long been a divisive topic in Maine. LePage came into office vowing to pay off state debts to hospitals <a href="http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20130918/INFO/309189984">incurred</a> under a Medicaid expansion in the 2000s. But the governor also declined to expand Medicaid even when confronted with the Affordable Care Act’s generous federal dollars, which account for 90 percent of the additional spending. Instead, he tightened eligibility requirements for MaineCare, the state’s Medicaid program. In the past five years, 40,000 Mainers have <a href="https://www.mejp.org/sites/default/files/whatyouneedtoknow-Mainecare_2017.pdf">lost health insurance</a>.</p>
<p>After LePage reshaped the state’s system, a person whose yearly income is $7,000 was still not poor enough for health insurance. “The whole fight over repealing and replacing Obamacare was positive in that it reminded Mainers of why they care about health care,” says Amy Fried, a University of Maine political science professor. “People want more and better health care, not less and worse health care.”</p>
<p>The multiple assaults on the ACA in Washington also spotlighted one of Maine’s own, Republican Senator Susan Collins, and her refusal to countenance an ACA repeal. Collins’s stance dialed up her popularity (passengers <a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/344527-collins-reminisces-about-heart-warming-welcome-in-maine-after">greeted Collins</a> with applause last summer when she arrived at Bangor’s airport after one of her no votes, a first for her) and contributed to her decision to stay in the Senate and not run for governor in 2018. The Maine vote “gives her even more strength and legitimacy to draw the line on cuts to Medicaid and to health care,” says Farmer.</p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">But Medicaid expansion supporters remain on guard in a state where successful voter initiatives have a history of running aground. </span>The Legislature failed to override LePage’s veto of a bill that would have created a framework for implementation for a recreational marijuana law that a slim majority of voters approved last year. The path forward for another 2016 initiative, ranked-choice voting, remains uncertain after Maine’s Supreme Judicial Court issued an advisory opinion finding that sections of the law violated the state constitution.</p>
<p>Surprising exactly no one, LePage has now pledged to not to implement the Medicaid expansion until the Legislature funds the state’s Medicaid match using the administration’s estimates of those costs (which are almost twice as high as the figures put forward by the nonpartisan budget office that provides analyses for state lawmakers).</p>
<p>Several factors may mute LePage’s bluster. Failing to implement expansion would violate the state constitution which requires voter initiatives to be implemented 45 days after the Legislature convenes in January; 90 days later the state Department of Health and Human Services must come up with an implementation plan. Eligible residents could enroll in Maine Care by mid-summer 2018. “If [the governor] does not meet the very specific timelines and deadlines in the law when it takes effect, then he is going to find himself in court,” says Farmer. “And his press releases and bluster are not going to play as well as they do on talk radio.”</p>
<p>State lawmakers aren’t likely to play ball with the governor either. They have passed a Medicaid expansion bill five times only to run up against five LePage vetoes. The initiative’s win, coming shortly before legislators hit the campaign trail next year, means that they must weigh LePage’s latest ultimatum against the expressed opinion of Maine voters.</p>
<p>Health care was also the single most-cited issue driving voters to the polls in Virginia, according to exit polls, where voters turned against a Republican legislature that had blocked Medicaid expansion. Maine’s experience also serves as a template for Medicaid expansion supporters in Idaho, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, and Utah who want to put the issue to a vote. The Pine Tree State’s success may alleviate the some of the trepidation among national health-care advocates that emerged when the ballot initiative idea came up about three years ago.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the Medicaid expansion victory sows a minefield for two prominent GOP gubernatorial candidates on the eve of Maine’s governor’s race. Former state health and human services commissioner Mary Mayhew toes LePage’s hard line, while state Senate President Mike Thibodeau opposed the ballot question and has voted against expansion twice. (His mid-coast district <a href="https://freepressonline.com/Content/Home/Homepage-Rotator/Article/Mainers-Approve-Medicaid-Expansion-in-a-Landslide/78/720/55729">came out strongly</a> for expansion.) Former House Speaker Mark Eves and Attorney General Janet Mills, who both support Medicaid expansion, are the leading contenders in a crowded Democratic field. In Maine, health-care reform remains a wedge issue for Democrats that could blunt the Republicans’ health-care-as-welfare mantra next year.</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 13 Nov 2017 18:44:42 +0000228912 at http://prospect.orgGabrielle GurleyThree Minutes with Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richardshttp://prospect.org/article/three-minutes-planned-parenthood%E2%80%99s-cecile-richards
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<div class="field-item even">(Photo by Andy Kropa/Invision/AP)</div>
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<p>Cecile Richards on April 5, 2017</p>
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<p><span class="dropcap">W</span>ith President Trump and the Republican Party determined to bulldoze over decades of women’s health-care gains, reproductive-rights advocates like Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood, have been on the front lines of an all-consuming battle to beat back that onslaught. “If we had a majority of people in Congress who could get pregnant, we wouldn’t be fighting about birth control,” she told <em>The American Prospect, </em>underlining one of her signature phrases. “I look forward to that day.”</p>
<p>After the 2016 election, Planned Parenthood and Richards (whom <em>The American Prospect</em> <a href="http://prospect.org/article/cecile-richards-grace-under-fire-planned-parenthood">featured</a> in a cover story last year) emerged as a kinetic force in the resistance movement. In tandem with dozens of other progressive organizations, Planned Parenthood has spearheaded get-out the-vote drives, town hall meetings on health-care policies, and immigrant-rights and racial-justice marches.</p>
<p>The<em> Prospect</em> spoke to Richards before she and Danielle Henry, of the Young Leaders of Planned Parenthood, accepted a community activism award (one of five presented Thursday night) from the Center for Community Change at its annual “Change Champions Awards” ceremony in Washington. </p>
<p>This conversation has been edited.</p>
<p><strong><em>The American Prospect</em>: As President Trump continues to hack away at the Affordable Care Act, where do you the see the country headed as Americans begin to turn their attention to 2018 midterm elections?</strong></p>
<p><strong>Richards:</strong> We’re seeing a progressive resurgence like I’ve never seen in my lifetime. I’ve been an organizer my entire life: I started out in the labor movement and am obviously now with Planned Parenthood. It’s almost impossible to channel all of the energy and outrage that’s out there in America.</p>
<p>It’s important for progressives to remember and celebrate our wins. [Republicans] control everything, Congress, the White House—and the fact that we’ve been able to beat back the repeal of Obamacare and the defunding of Planned Parenthood for months now shows that grassroots organizing is working.</p>
<p>I hope this will energize people going into the 2018 elections. There are a number of members of Congress who voted against the interests of their districts, voted against health-care rights for working people. These are issues that are going to animate the voters—they already have.</p>
<p><strong>What do you make of this unprecedented, ten-month-long assault on women’s reproductive rights?</strong></p>
<p>It feels like we are back in the 1850s instead of 2017. The thought that the president of the United States and all of the people that he’s put in office, and the folks in Congress, are trying to take away birth control benefits for people is absolutely crazy.</p>
<p>More than 90 percent of the women in this country use birth control. We are now at record low for teenage pregnancy; we are at a 30-year low for unintended pregnancies. That’s something that we should both be celebrating and doubling down on. But this president is putting his own ego and his own politics ahead of the welfare of American families.</p>
<p><strong>When people say, “What can I possibly do at a very local level? All of this seems very daunting,” how do you respond?</strong></p>
<p>What they can do is not wait for instructions. What I’ve seen across the country, whether it is in rural Michigan, Indiana, or my home state of Texas, is that people are organizing on their own. Find a way that you can make a difference in your own home district. A record number of people are running for office. So many women who have never thought about running before are now registering and, that, to me, is where we are going to change it. </p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 13 Oct 2017 15:12:36 +0000228713 at http://prospect.orgGabrielle Gurley